Emergency plumbing, answered.
Water where it shouldn't be is frightening at any hour. Ring us and a person picks up — not a machine — and an engineer is moving towards you within minutes, usually at your door inside the hour.
What counts as an emergency?
If it's on this list, don't wait until morning and don't feel bad about ringing at 3am — that's what the night van is for. Dad took the first middle-of-the-night call in 1987 and we've never stopped answering.
- A burst pipe — or any water you can't turn off. Every minute matters; call while you look for the stopcock.
- A major leak — coming through a ceiling, running down a wall, or anywhere near sockets or light fittings.
- No water at all — the whole house dry, not just one slow tap.
- A blocked or overflowing toilet — when it's the only loo in the house. With a second bathroom it can usually wait; with one, it can't.
- No heating or hot water — in a home with babies, elderly relatives or anyone unwell, especially in winter.
- A smell of gas — this one has its own rule. Read the green box below before you do anything else.
Smell gas? Don't call us first.
Call the National Gas Emergency line on 0800 111 999 — free, 24 hours, and the correct first call for any gas smell in the UK. Open windows and doors, don't touch light switches or anything electrical, put cigarettes out and get everyone outside. Once the gas network has made things safe, ring us and we'll handle the repair. That number is real even though this website is a demo — everything else here is fictional, that advice isn't.
Do this right now.
Four things that can save your floors, your ceilings and your electrics before we've even started the van. Do what you safely can — and if you can't find the stopcock, ring anyway and we'll talk you through it.
Find the stopcock
Usually under the kitchen sink — sometimes in a downstairs loo, under the stairs or by the front door. It's a brass tap on the main pipe coming into the house.
Turn it off
Clockwise until it stops. Stiff ones need two hands and a bit of nerve — that's normal on a valve that hasn't moved in years. This shuts off water to the whole house.
Open the cold taps
Every cold tap in the house, and flush the loo. This drains what's left in the pipes so the leak slows to a dribble instead of a flood.
Kill the electrics
Water near sockets, lights or the fuse board? Switch off at the consumer unit — but only if you can reach it without stepping through water. If you can't, leave it and tell us.
Then call: 023 8018 0958What happens when you ring.
No hold music, no call centre reading a script in another city. The phone rings in Southampton and it's answered by someone who can actually send help — at 2pm or 2am.
You'll know the engineer's name before they arrive, you'll know when they're close, and you'll know the price before a single tool comes out of the bag.
Call 023 8018 0958 →You call
A real person answers, asks what's happened and talks you through making things safer while help is organised.
Engineer assigned
You get a name and an honest ETA by text — the nearest engineer to you, not whoever's next on a list somewhere.
Tracked to your door
A message when they're twenty minutes out, so you're not standing at the window in your dressing gown wondering.
Made safe, priced, fixed
First job is stopping the damage. Then you get a clear price, agreed before work starts — and most emergencies are fixed on that first visit.
Typical night-time response
Fourteen vans across the city means someone is never far from you. These are the honest averages, not the hopeful ones.
| Where you are | Typical response |
|---|---|
| Southampton city — Shirley, Portswood, Bitterne, Woolston, Bassett | 45–60 min |
| Totton, Eastleigh, Hedge End | 60–75 min |
| Winchester, Fareham | 75–90 min |
Demo — response times illustrative. Not sure if we cover you? Check your postcode.
Tell us what's happened.
If water is actively pouring in right now, don't type — call. For everything else, send this and we'll ring you straight back with a name and an ETA.
Request received.
(Demo — nothing was sent.) On the live site this would ring through to the on-call engineer's phone within seconds, and you'd get a call back with a name and an ETA.
Flooding right now?
Skip the form. The phone is faster — a person answers day and night, and the clock starts the moment you ring.
Call 023 8018 0958Burst pipe under the bath at quarter to three in the morning. The chap on the phone talked my husband to the stopcock while I moved the furniture, and Robert was on the doorstep 40 minutes later. By half four it was mended and he'd mopped the landing. Extraordinary.
The questions people ask at 3am
Stopcock off?
Now let's get it fixed.
Thirty-nine years of night calls and we've yet to hear one we couldn't handle. Ring now and an engineer is on the way.