Emergency Plumber Medway

If you can smell gas, call the National Gas Emergency Service on 0800 111 999 before you call anybody else. It is free, it answers around the clock, and they come out to make the property safe. Do not touch any electrical switches, do not use a naked flame, open the doors and windows, turn the gas off at the meter if you can reach it safely, and if the smell is strong get everyone out.

If it is water, turn it off at the internal stop tap, open the cold taps to drain the pipework down, and then ring a plumber. We are a Gas Safe registered and OFTEC certified business based in Bearsted, a short run from the Medway towns, and emergency call-outs start from £80. Below is what genuinely needs somebody tonight, and what will keep until the morning.

Gas first, and separately

It is worth being blunt about why the order matters. A registered engineer repairs gas faults and recommissions appliances. The emergency service makes an unsafe property safe, and that is a different job with a different urgency. Calling a plumber first for a gas smell delays the part that protects you, and no plumber worth using will thank you for it.

Once the property has been made safe, that is the point a Gas Safe engineer picks it up, finds the fault and puts the appliances back into service. Both halves are needed and they happen in that order. The same applies to a suspected carbon monoxide problem, where the risk is not something you can assess by looking and an alarm going off is treated as real until proven otherwise.

What counts as an emergency

Some things genuinely will wait, and it is worth knowing which before ringing anybody late at night. Water you cannot stop is an emergency. Water near electrics is an emergency. A gas smell is an emergency. No heating or hot water in a house with a baby, an elderly resident or somebody unwell in it is an emergency as well.

A boiler that has locked out, resets and then runs normally is not, and it will keep until somebody can look at it properly. Neither is one cold radiator, or a slow waste. Those are ordinary daytime jobs, and a lockout in particular is often something you can settle yourself in a few minutes.

What to do before anybody arrives

For water, the sequence matters more than the speed. Stop tap off, cold taps open to drain the pipes down, electricity off at the consumer unit if water is anywhere near wiring, and heating off. In our experience, getting the stop tap off works better than reaching for buckets and towels first, because a burst keeps running for as long as the supply is on, and Southern Water's own advice puts the stop tap first and the towels after it. The draining down step is the one nearly everybody skips, and it is frequently the difference between a wet floor and a ceiling coming down.

Telling a plumber where the water is coming from helps more than telling them what you think has broken, because the first thing they need to know is whether it can be isolated before they arrive.

So when you ring, describe what you can see rather than diagnosing it. Which room, whether it is clean or dirty water, whether it stops when the stop tap is closed, and whether the heating is involved. That tells us what to bring, and sometimes it means the water can be stopped before anybody sets off.

What the Medway towns add to it

Rochester, Chatham, Gillingham, Rainham and Strood run together along the river, and a lot of the housing is terraced and rented. That matters in an emergency for two practical reasons.

The first is shared supplies. In older terraces one original main frequently serves several houses, and an external stop tap under a cover in the pavement may not be yours alone. So the internal stop tap is the one to find and the one to use, and turning something off in the street is a good way to cut off a neighbour without solving your own problem.

The second is tenancy. In a let property the tenant is usually the one standing in the water and the landlord is the one who has to authorise the work, which wastes time nobody has. The properties that handle it best are the ones where the tenant already knows where the stop tap is and has a number to ring, which costs a landlord nothing to arrange and is worth more than most things in the gas safety folder.

Blocked drains, and who actually pays

Worth knowing before you pay anybody, because it catches out a lot of people in terraced streets. Since October 2011 the shared drains and sewers serving more than one property transferred to the water companies in England. So a blockage in a length of drain that serves your house and your neighbours is generally not yours to sort out and not yours to pay for.

What remains yours is the private drain inside your boundary that serves only your property. The practical test is roughly where the problem is and how many houses it affects. If the whole terrace is backing up, ring the water company before ringing a drainage firm, because they will attend and it will not cost you.

What happens when we get there

An emergency call-out starts from £80, and the first job is stopping the water and making the situation safe rather than making it tidy. A burst can usually be isolated and either capped or repaired on the same visit, with anything cosmetic left for daylight and quoted separately.

If what has failed is one of several pipes in the same condition, we will say so rather than repairing one and leaving you to call again in a fortnight. And if it turns out not to be urgent after all, we will tell you that too, because a reputation for turning up honestly is worth more than one call-out fee.

It is also worth setting expectations about what an out of hours visit can finish. Merchants are shut, so an unusual part is not going to appear at eleven at night. What that visit does is stop the damage, isolate whatever has failed and get you through until morning safely, and the permanent repair follows once the part can be had. Anybody promising a full finished repair on any fault at any hour is describing a van that does not exist.

So, gas to 0800 111 999 first and always. Water to the stop tap, then the taps, then the phone. And find that stop tap this week rather than in the dark. CTL Plumbing & Heating covers Rochester, Chatham, Gillingham, Rainham, Strood and the villages around them from Bearsted. If you need somebody now, get in touch or call and text 07710 544484.