Emergency plumber South East

A street-wide loss of water is the water company’s to fix, not a problem with your pipes, and nobody should charge you to tell you that. The South East is supplied by several companies — Southern Water, South East Water, Thames Water, Portsmouth Water and SES Water among them — and which one is yours can change from one street to the next, so check the top of your water bill. If the water is off or leaking only in your own property, it is ours.

Yes. The town list is where our plumbers are based, not a boundary. Most of the villages between them are a shorter drive for us than the next town over, and we will tell you the honest travel time when you call.

30 to 60 minutes for most of the region, because our plumbers are spread across the eight counties rather than working out of one depot. Somewhere genuinely remote will take longer, and we say so on the phone rather than quote a number we cannot keep.

Yes. Most of the water across the South East comes from underground chalk, which makes it hard, and both Thames Water and South East Water say as much. On a kettle or a shower head that is just a nuisance. Inside the system it matters more: scale can build up on a boiler’s heat exchanger and on heating elements, clog valves and narrow pipes, and that can sit behind a lot of “the boiler has stopped” and “no hot water” calls. Descaling a tap or a shower head is a ten-minute job with the right product. If the hot water keeps running cold, the pressure is dropping or the boiler has started to groan, ring us. We will tell you honestly whether a service, a descale or a water softener is the sensible answer — and when it is none of them.

Call us anyway. We can stop the water and make the property safe on a tenant’s say-so; anything beyond that we agree with the landlord or managing agent. A landlord is generally responsible for the plumbing and the heating and hot water in a rented home, so tell yours or their agent as well. In student towns like Oxford, Canterbury and Brighton we handle that at two in the morning fairly often.

Possibly, and you can check in two minutes. Turn off every tap and every appliance that uses water, then look at your water meter. If the dial or the small leak indicator is still moving, water is going somewhere it should not. The usual culprits are a toilet cistern quietly running into the pan, a dripping tap or a leaking supply pipe underground. Many water companies offer help or an allowance on the bill for a hidden leak on the supply pipe, so ask yours. If the meter is moving and you cannot see why, ring us and we will find it.