A plumbing emergency is anything that is actively damaging the building or making it unsafe to occupy: water running from a burst pipe or a failed supply line, a leak that has reached a ceiling, sewage backing up into a fixture, a water heater flooding, no water at all in the house, or a smell of gas. Shut the water off first, at the fixture if you can reach it and at the main if you cannot, then call. We answer the phone 24 hours a day.
What counts as a plumbing emergency?
Not everything that is wrong at 11pm has to be fixed at 11pm. These are the situations where waiting costs you more than calling:
- An active leak you cannot stop
- Water from a burst pipe, a failed braided supply line, a leaking valve or a failed water heater. One burst pipe in our files soaked carpet, padding, wall paneling and insulation in a finished basement and reached the ceiling drywall above the bar before it was stopped. Another began as a metal braided supply line letting go in an upstairs bathroom and ended with the kitchen ceiling below it ruined.
- Water appearing in a ceiling
- By the time a ceiling is stained, water has been running inside the structure for a while. On one call, opening the ceiling in several places to trace it exposed a leaking 3/4 inch copper line and, above it, a subfloor contaminated with mold and sewage.
- Sewage backing up into a fixture
- A toilet that gurgles and then pushes waste into a kitchen sink, a bar sink or a tub is a main line problem, and every additional flush makes it worse.
- A house with no water
- Either something has been shut and cannot be reopened, or the supply side has failed. On one call there was no water at a kitchen faucet at all because the stop valves had broken apart internally and their debris had clogged the faucet.
- A basement filling because the pressure has failed
- A failed pressure reducing valve puts full street pressure into the house and takes out valves, supply lines and connections in numbers. This is covered in its own section below because most homeowners have never heard of it.
- A smell of gas
- This one is not a plumbing call first. Leave the building and call the gas utility. See below.
A gas smell is not a plumbing call first — leave the building
If you smell gas inside the house, do not troubleshoot it and do not wait for a plumber. Get everyone out of the building, leave the door open behind you, and call the gas utility from outside. Do not switch lights on or off, do not use appliances, and do not operate a garage door opener — any of those can make a spark.
The gas utility will make the property safe and shut the supply. After that, the repair work — a corroded gas line, a failed gas valve, a gas flex connector, a sediment trap or drip leg that was never fitted correctly — is ours, performed under permit and to the Virginia building code, with the municipal gas inspection to follow. See gas line installation and repair.
Emergency shut-offs: what to turn off before we arrive
Find these now, while nothing is wrong. It takes five minutes and it is the single most useful thing a homeowner can do.
- The fixture stop. Under a toilet or a sink, a small valve on the supply line. Turn it clockwise. If it will not turn, or it starts weeping when you touch it, stop and go to the main — aged stops failing at the moment they are needed is one of the most common things we are called out for.
- The main water shut-off. Usually where the service line enters the house — a basement, a utility room, a mechanical room, or a crawl space. In some houses it has been closed inside a finished wall by a previous contractor; on one job we found the pressure reducing valve sealed into a wall more than fifteen years earlier with no access at all. If yours is buried, that is worth correcting before you need it.
- The water heater. If the heater is what is leaking, shut the cold supply valve on top of it. On a gas heater turn the gas control to OFF; on an electric heater switch off its breaker, because an element that fires in an empty tank destroys itself in minutes.
- The power to the affected area, if water is running anywhere near outlets, a panel or a pump.
- Nothing else. Do not pour chemical drain cleaner into a backed-up line. We have arrived to fixtures standing full of waste water and drain cleaner, which makes the line no easier to clear and the work considerably less pleasant.
Do you have an after-hours and weekend emergency plumber?
We answer the phone 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, at (703) 256-8080. A person takes the call, asks what is happening and what you have already shut off, and tells you honestly whether this is a tonight problem or a tomorrow problem.
That honesty matters. Plenty of calls are genuinely urgent. Plenty are not — a slow drip into a bucket, a running toilet, a dripping outside faucet — and saying so plainly is worth more to us than one after-hours ticket. Sam & Sons Services has been doing this work in Northern Virginia since 1999, under Virginia DPOR license #2705070610, on that basis.
When you call, have ready: what is leaking or backing up, what you have shut off, whether the water has stopped, whether it is gas or electric if a heater is involved, and where in the building it is.
Burst and frozen pipes: the winter plumbing emergency
Cold-weather failures in this area concentrate in a few predictable places: outdoor hose bibs, pipes run in uninsulated exterior walls, and lines in crawl spaces.
- Exterior wall runs. On one call a water pipe behind a kitchen end cabinet froze and split because it sat in an uninsulated exterior wall cavity. The repair was not only the pipe: insulation paneling between the framing, a foam sleeve around the pipe, the cabinet cut back so the pipe could be reached from the room, and the drywall reinstated leaving the pipe area accessible.
- Hose bibs. A frozen outdoor hose bib is often found during an unrelated call. Replacement is with a quarter-turn bib with a bleeder and a vacuum breaker.
- What a burst leaves behind. A burst pipe is two jobs. The plumbing is the quick part. The wet part — carpet and padding, wall paneling, insulation, ceiling drywall — has to come out, the framing gets treated with mold control and sealed with a stain-blocking primer, and only then does it get rebuilt.
See burst and frozen pipe repair for that work in full, and pipe repair and leak detection when you can hear water but cannot find it.
When a failed PRV floods a house: the emergency nobody expects
This is the failure most homeowners have never heard of, and it is behind a large share of the sudden, multi-point leaks we are called to.
Almost every house on public water here has a pressure reducing valve where the service line enters. When it fails, the house sees full street pressure, and everything with a seal in it starts giving way at once. On one call a gauge on the house read over 90 psi and the failed PRV had already taken out shut-off valves and the kitchen faucet. On another, a PRV found leaking and rusted through was identified as the cause of leaking valves all over the house and a leak at the water heater. On a third, a follow-up check after a heater failure found ten leaking cut-off valves in one property. One homeowner called about nothing more alarming than a whistling noise in the plumbing — the PRV had failed, and three more broken valves turned up while the technician checked the rest of the house.
The correction is a new pressure reducing valve with an isolation valve, a pressure gauge so the reading can be seen without a technician, and a bonding ground, plus every valve the high pressure has already ruined. See water pressure, PRVs and shut-off valves.
Sewage backing up: an emergency not to wait on
Waste coming back into the building is both a health problem and a signal that the blockage is downstream of several fixtures at once.
- Multiple fixtures affected. On one call, flushing an upstairs toilet pushed sewage into the kitchen sink and the bar sink, and a glued PVC P-trap under the kitchen sink was leaking waste in two places.
- Snaking the fixture is not enough. On another, snaking a toilet alone did not clear it and the bowl kept refilling; the toilet had to be pulled to reach and clear the main line.
- Odor without a backup. A sewage ejector pit whose lid had been cut to build a cabinet around it was open to the room — the odor was the lid, not the line.
- Water surfacing where there is no fixture. On one leak search nothing showed until the drains were run; water then bubbled up at a basement closet corner, which meant a broken waste line under the concrete slab.
Stop using water in the building until it is cleared, and see sewer line repair and cleaning.
What an emergency plumber does on arrival
- Stop the water. Isolate at the closest point that actually holds, and drain the system down where the repair needs it.
- Find the source rather than the symptom. Where the source is not obvious we run fixtures and drains one at a time and watch where water surfaces, open drywall or ceiling in the minimum number of places needed to trace a line, and — on suspected continuous loss — photograph the water meter and re-read it after a hold period to establish whether anything is still flowing.
- Put a gauge on the house. Static pressure is checked on our plumbing calls as a matter of course, because it explains an enormous share of what we are called out for.
- Check the rest of the building. When one valve has failed under pressure, the others are usually next. We check them while we are there rather than coming back.
- Make it safe and make it dry, then show you what was found and what the options are before any further work is agreed.
- Pull the permit where the repair requires one, perform the work to the Virginia building code, and close out on inspection.
If the failure is the water heater — leaking, flooding, or simply dead — see water heater repair.
What emergency plumbing costs, and how we price it
We do not quote by phone and we do not publish numbers, and that holds at two in the morning as much as at two in the afternoon. Nobody can price a leak they have not seen, and an urgent call is exactly the moment a homeowner is most likely to accept a figure that later changes.
What we will do on the phone is tell you what to shut off, whether you need someone tonight, and what is likely to be involved. An estimator prices the work in person, in writing, before the repair begins — including the drywall, mold treatment and rebuild that water damage usually brings with it.