¿Quién puede reparar una tubería reventada en Calpe?

1. Shut off the main water supplyIf it is safe to reach. This is the step that stops the damage — everything else is secondary to it.
2. Stop using the plumbingTaps, showers, washing machine, dishwasher. Nothing until it has been looked at.
3. Move what you canFurniture, documents, electrical items, anything at floor level in the path of the water.
4. Stay away from exposed electricsIf water has reached sockets, wiring or a fuse board, do not touch them and do not stand in the water.
5. CallTell us whether you managed to stop the water. That single fact decides how fast this needs to be.

This is the case the standard advice skips, and it is the one that turns a repair into a disaster.

If the stopcock will not turn, does not stop the water when it does turn, or you cannot find it at all, stop looking and call immediately. Say that on the phone — “I can’t shut it off” moves you to the front of the queue, because every minute is damage.

While you wait: if the property is a flat, check whether there is a valve in a shared riser or landing cupboard, and tell the neighbours below. If there is a meter box outside, there is sometimes a valve there too.

In this article

1. What to do right now
2. What if you cannot stop the water?
3. What causes a pipe to burst?
4. The leak you can see may not be the break
5. How much damage can it do?
6. Does the whole pipe need replacing?
7. Why use a local plumber in Calpe

The full version
Burst pipe emergency: what to do in the first 30 minutes

• ageing or corroded pipework;
• damaged joints or fittings;
• water pressure higher than the installation was built for;
• deterioration in concealed pipes, where nothing was visible beforehand;
• accidental damage during building or renovation work;
• movement or stress on the pipe run.

Most of these have been developing for a long time. A pipe rarely bursts because of what happened today — it bursts because of what has been happening for years, and today was when it gave way.

Water travels. It runs along pipe runs, inside wall cavities and under floors before it surfaces, which means the wet patch in your hallway may be some distance from the pipe that actually failed.

This is why opening the wall at the wet patch so often finds nothing. Locating the break properly before anything is cut into is what keeps the repair small and stops you paying to repair two holes instead of one. That is part of our fontanería general work.

Walls, ceilings, floors, furniture and finishes, and damp or staining that turns up in rooms nowhere near where the pipe broke.

The worst case is a property with nobody in it. In an unoccupied villa, a holiday home or a rental between guests, a burst pipe runs until someone happens to arrive — days, sometimes weeks. There is no early stage to catch, because nobody is there for the early stage. By the time it is discovered it is not a plumbing job, it is a building one.

If the property is empty for part of the year, consider shutting off the main supply whenever you lock up. It costs nothing and it is the only measure that works when nobody is there.

The question worth asking is not just how to fix this break, but whether it is a one-off or the first of several. If the pipework is at the age where one section has gone, the rest is the same age — see who can replace corroded pipes in a Calpe property.

Because the time between the burst and the repair is the whole cost. Everything else — the quality of the fix, the price of the parts — is minor next to how many hours the water ran.

A local plumber also looks at the property rather than just the pipe: whether this is an isolated failure or the installation telling you something, and whether the same thing is about to happen three metres further along. We handle both residential and commercial work, urgent leaks, unexplained water loss and the follow-up repairs afterwards.

See our servicio de fontanería de urgencia, fontanería general and full servicios de fontanería. If the failure was the incoming supply pipe rather than one inside the property, who can repair a broken water supply pipe in Calpe covers that case.