Home › Burst Pipes
Severe weather warning for your hallway. The next five minutes matter more than the next five hours, and every step is one you can do yourself.
What do I do about a burst pipe right now? Close the main stopcock — usually under the kitchen sink — then open the cold taps to drain the pipework, and cut the electrics at the consumer unit if water is anywhere near them and it's safe to reach. Once the flow has stopped, ring 020 4577 2888 to be put through to a local plumber, any hour of the day or night.
Water off, taps open, electrics safe, heating off, then the phone. In that order — the towels come dead last.
The instinct is to grab whatever's in the airing cupboard and chase the puddle. Resist it — nothing improves while the pipe is still being fed, so work through the list first:
A tap that slowed to a dribble before the burst, in a cold snap — that's the tell. Keep the water off and don't warm anything else up yet.
It's a familiar sequence around here: a wet, mild spell, then a clear night off the Sperrins drops the temperature hard, and any pipe in a loft, garage, outbuilding or external wall that never got lagged turns to a stick of ice by morning. The freeze happens quietly. The split happens quietly too. It's only the thaw that announces itself, usually as a flood arriving on schedule a few hours later.
If you've caught a pipe that's frozen but not yet leaking, count that as good luck and act gently — stopcock off first as insurance, then a hairdryer on low or towels soaked in warm water, working along the pipe. A naked flame is never the answer, not a blowtorch, not once. And if it's already split, stop trying to thaw it: leave the water off and call, because melting the ice with the mains still on just books your flood in for later. Farms and outlying houses toward Plumbridge or Donemana, with long exposed supply runs, see this pattern hardest every winter.
You can slow it; you can't fix it. Repair tape or a pipe clamp on a drained pipe is a fair stopgap — reopening the stopcock afterwards is the mistake.
Self-amalgamating tape or a slip-on repair clamp holds a small split well enough to stop the dripping while you wait, and there's no harm in using either. Trouble starts when the patch gives someone the confidence to turn the water back on — a taped joint fighting mains pressure is a bet you'll usually lose, often at an hour when nobody wants to be mopping.
Take extra care in the older streets near the town centre and the mill terraces at Sion Mills, where pipework has often been spliced together in stages over a long lifetime — lead into copper into plastic — and the joint next to the one you're patching may be just as tired. Disturb one and you can wake another. Leave the water off, treat your patch as a courtesy to the carpet, and let the plumber make the repair that actually holds.
One test settles it: close your stopcock and watch. Leak stops — it's your side. Water keeps coming, or it's surfacing outside — it's likely the supply pipe or the mains.
The general UK split works like this: everything from the property boundary into and through your home is the owner's to fix, while the public mains beyond the boundary belongs to the water authority — here, that's NI Water. Water bubbling up through a footpath, a soaked verge outside the gate, or a leak that carries on regardless of your closed stopcock all point toward the public side, and NI Water is the right call for a suspected mains leak.
The grey area is the supply pipe running between the boundary and your walls — usually still the owner's job, and a common culprit on rural properties where a long private run crosses a field or a lane out toward Artigarvan or Victoria Bridge. A plumber can help pin down which side of the line the fault sits on, and will tell you plainly when a fix isn't theirs to sell you.
Under the kitchen sink first — that reading holds true for most houses, including the older terraces near the town centre and the mill-village streets at Sion Mills. No luck there, check wherever the supply pipe first arrives: hall cupboard, utility room, garage, under the stairs. Farmhouses out toward Castlederg or Newtownstewart often carry an outside stop valve too, under a small lid near the boundary. If it won't turn, don't force it until it snaps — leave it and ring.
If the burst is on the heating or hot water side, or you've drained the system by opening the cold taps, yes — switch the boiler off and leave it off until a plumber has checked it over. A boiler firing with little or no water in the system can damage itself, and that turns one repair bill into two.
Many UK buildings policies cover escape-of-water damage, but the excess and the small print vary a lot, and anything put down to gradual wear and tear can be treated differently by an insurer. Read your own policy, report it promptly, and photograph everything before you start mopping — those photos are your evidence.
Stopcock off first, then electricity off at the consumer unit if you can reach it without standing in water — never touch a wet switch or fitting. Keep well clear of any ceiling that's sagging. If there's only a small bulge, piercing it gently with something thin, over a bucket, lets the water down in a controlled way instead of all at once.
The main page — how the line works and the areas it covers.
Go to home →Falling pressure, no heat, fault codes — and gas safety.
Read the bulletin →What to try yourself and when it's NI Water's sewer, not yours.
Read the bulletin →Honest ballparks and the questions to ask before work starts.
Read the bulletin →Pressure, controls, the immersion — the checks before you call.
Read the bulletin →Thawing safely with gentle heat — and the lagging that prevents it.
Read the bulletin →Damp patches, falling pressure and the stopcock test.
Read the bulletin →Ring any hour to be put through to a local plumber covering Strabane and the surrounding towns and townlands.
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