Emergency Plumbing
The overnight line, what counts as an emergency and realistic response windows.
Learn moreEmergency plumbing
A Pipe Let Go. The Job Now Is Minutes, Not Hours
Once a supply line opens up, the volume is remarkable, a modest split can put hundreds of gallons into a house in an hour. Shut off the main, open a low tap, and call. Everything after that is a repair with a known price rather than an escalating disaster.
Lines are open right now:
(833) 472-2088
Shut the main, open a low tap, then call. In that order.
Talked through the shutoff
If you don't know where the main is, we'll find it with you on the phone.
Repaired, not patched
The failed section comes out. Tape and clamps are not a repair.
Cause identified
Freeze, corrosion, pressure or a bad fitting, each means something different.
Documented for you
Written quote, invoice and the removed pipe kept if you need to make a claim.
Right now
Stop the water first. Everything else is negotiable.
The single largest factor in what a burst pipe ends up costing is how many minutes the water ran. Not the plumber's rate, not the material, not the hour of the night, the minutes.
So the order is: close the main. If you can see which fixture or branch failed and there is a local shutoff, close that instead and keep the rest of the house in service. Then open the lowest tap in the building, a basement laundry sink, a ground-floor tub, so the standing water in the piping drains there rather than through the split. If the water is anywhere near electrical equipment or a panel, and you can reach the breakers without standing in water, kill power to the affected area.
Then call. We will dispatch while you are still on the line, and while you wait: move what you can off the floor, get towels under the leading edge of the water rather than trying to mop the middle, and take photographs of everything before you clean up. If the burst is above a ceiling, a small drilled hole at the lowest point of the bulge drains it in a controlled place instead of letting the whole sheet come down.
If you cannot find the main shutoff
Call anyway, this is one of the most common questions the overnight line answers. In most Idaho homes the main is where the service enters: the crawl space, a basement wall, a utility closet, or the meter box near the street, which needs a meter key or a large flathead. We will talk you to it.
Can't find the shutoff? We'll walk you to it on the phone.
Causes
Five reasons pipes burst in Idaho houses
The cause matters, because it decides whether you are buying one repair or the first of several.
Freeze
The big one, and seasonal. Water expands as it freezes, pressure builds in the trapped section, and the pipe splits at its weakest point. The failure is usually discovered on the thaw rather than during the freeze, which is why frozen pipe repair and burst repair are so often the same call.
Corrosion in galvanized steel
Older housing in Boise's North End, the Nampa and Caldwell cores, Pocatello, Idaho Falls and pre-war Coeur d'Alene frequently still has galvanized supply. It rusts from the inside, narrowing until pressure and flow suffer, and eventually it fails at a threaded joint or a pinhole. A pinhole in galvanized is not a one-off, it is a report on the age of the whole system. See galvanized pipe replacement.
Excessive static pressure
Municipal pressure in parts of the valley and along the foothills runs higher than residential plumbing wants to live with. Sustained high pressure stresses every joint, shortens the life of fill valves, supply hoses and water heaters, and turns a marginal fitting into a burst one. A pressure gauge on a hose bib costs almost nothing and answers the question in thirty seconds, pressure regulator service is the fix.
Bad workmanship at fittings
An unsupported crimp, a solvent-weld joint that was assembled cold and dry, a compression nut cross-threaded on an angle stop. These fail on their own timetable, often years later, and they show up disproportionately in fast-built subdivision housing where a lot of connections were made quickly.
Water hammer and movement
Pipe that is not properly strapped moves every time a valve slams shut. Over years, that movement work-hardens copper at the bends and fatigues joints. If your pipes bang when the washing machine valve closes, that is the sound of a future repair.
The work
Cut it out, replace it, prove it holds
A proper repair removes the failed section. Clamps, epoxy putty, self-amalgamating tape and pipe sleeves have a legitimate place as a temporary measure at two in the morning when the supply house is shut, but they are a way to get to daylight, not a repair, and any plumber who leaves one behind should have told you it is coming back out.
What replacement looks like depends on the material. Copper gets cut back to sound metal and rejoined by soldering or with press fittings, which are increasingly the choice inside walls because they need no flame. Galvanized steel is rarely repaired in kind; the practical move is to cut the failed run out and replace it with copper or PEX, using dielectric unions where the two metals meet. PEX is cut and recrimped, and it usually failed at the fitting rather than in the tube. CPVC gets a solvent-welded repair with proper cure time before pressure returns, rushing that cure is a common cause of the second call.
Then it gets tested. The system is repressurised, held, and inspected at the repair and at the fittings either side of it, because the event that broke one joint often stressed its neighbours. In a freeze, especially, the first split is regularly not the only one.
When the pipe is somewhere unpleasant
Inside a wall, above a finished ceiling, under a slab or in a crawl space with standing water in it, these are the same repair with worse access, and access is most of the cost. A good plumber opens the smallest hole that permits a proper job, and tells you honestly when rerouting a short run through accessible space is cheaper than reaching the original one.
Overnight bursts get triaged first. Say what you're seeing.
Documentation
Two trades, in the right order
A burst pipe generates two jobs. The plumber stops the water and repairs the pipe. Someone else dries the building. Confusing the two, or starting the second before the first is finished, is how people end up paying twice.
Water moves along framing and under flooring far beyond what is visible, and the material that matters is what you cannot see: insulation in a wall cavity, the underside of subfloor, the pad beneath carpet. If the escape was more than a few gallons, dehumidification and moisture readings are worth doing properly rather than optimistically, and in Idaho's dry summer air people often assume it will simply dry out, which is true for surfaces and false for cavities.
For the paperwork: photograph the water before you touch it and the pipe before it is cut out, and ask for the removed section to be left with you. Keep the written quote and the invoice, and make sure the invoice describes the cause in plain words rather than just listing parts. Coverage questions are between you and your insurer, we do not advise on policies, but the record a plumber leaves behind is either useful in that conversation or it is not, and that is a choice made on the day.
The bigger decision
When the third repair means you should stop repairing
One burst on a fifteen-year-old copper system is an event. Three bursts in two years on eighty-year-old galvanized is a pattern, and pattern failures deserve arithmetic rather than another patch.
The signals that a system rather than a section has reached the end: repeated pinholes in different rooms, flow that has dropped noticeably over the years, rusty water on first draw in the morning, visible scaling at every fitting that gets opened, and a plumber who says "this is the third one I've done on this street." At that point the money spent on repairs is being spent twice, because the next repair is already scheduled by the pipe itself.
Whole-home repiping is disruptive but boring, in the good sense, it is planned work, staged so that a household usually keeps water most nights, priced in advance, and finished. Compared with the emergency version, where the schedule is set by a pipe at midnight, it is almost always the cheaper way to arrive at the same place.
The honest counterpoint: repiping is not the answer for a single freeze failure in an otherwise sound system, and nobody should be talked into it on a night call. If someone quotes you a repipe while your floor is wet, get the repair, dry the house, and have the bigger conversation in daylight.
Second or third failure on the same system? Worth a conversation.
How it runs
From the split to the pressure test
The first two steps are yours, and they matter more than anything the plumber does afterwards.
Isolate the water
Main or local shutoff closed, lowest tap opened to drain standing pressure, power off to any wet area you can safely reach.
Expose and remove
The failed section is located and opened up with the smallest access that allows a proper job, then cut back to sound pipe on both sides.
Rejoin, test, explain
New section installed in the appropriate material, system repressurised and held, neighbouring joints inspected, and the cause explained in plain words.
Coverage
Burst pipe response, statewide
Bursts cluster in two kinds of housing: older cores with original galvanized supply, and the newest subdivisions where a lot of fittings were made quickly. Both exist in every region on this site, so the overnight line covers all 82 communities and 124 ZIP codes.
Questions
Burst pipe questions
More than people expect. A half-inch supply line at typical household pressure can move several gallons a minute, so an hour unattended is hundreds of gallons, and it does not sit politely in one room. That arithmetic is the entire reason the advice is always shutoff first, phone second.
A pipe repair clamp or self-amalgamating tape over a clean split can genuinely buy you a few hours, and there is no harm in trying if the pipe is accessible and the water is off while you do it. Treat it as a tourniquet: it is holding, it is not fixed, and it needs to come out and be replaced properly.
For common repairs on copper, PEX and CPVC in standard residential sizes, generally yes. For unusual materials, large diameters, or anything requiring a specific fixture or appliance, the honest answer is that the supply house opens in the morning, in which case the overnight job is to stabilise, restore water to the rest of the house, and finish properly on the next visit.
With freeze damage that is exactly what you would expect. The ice plug forms first and then pressure builds in the water trapped between the plug and a closed tap, so the pipe fails wherever the wall is weakest, often a straight run rather than the joints. It is a good clue: a mid-run split points at freeze, while failure at threads or fittings points at corrosion, workmanship or movement.
Turn the water off, keep people out from under it, and if you are comfortable doing so, drill or punch a small hole at the lowest point of the bulge with a bucket underneath. A controlled drain through one small hole is much better than the whole sheet of drywall releasing at once, which it will, and heavily.
It depends on how much water got in and how thoroughly the cavities dried. Surfaces in Idaho's dry air dry quickly, which gives false confidence; wall cavities, insulation and subfloor do not. If the escape was significant, moisture readings and mechanical drying are worth the money. Plumbing repair does not include drying the structure, and any plumber who tells you otherwise is selling something.
It is worth attending to. Banging is water hammer, a pressure wave in a system with insufficient strapping, no arrestors, or pressure that is too high. It fatigues joints over time. It is also easy and cheap to address compared with the repair it eventually causes.
No, and nobody should push you into that decision on a wet night. One failure on a sound system is a repair. Repeated failures, dropping pressure, rusty first-draw water and pinholes in different rooms are the pattern that justifies looking at the whole system, in daylight, with a written proposal you have time to read.
Weekends and holidays included. The number doesn't change.
Every minute the water runs adds to the bill.
Close the valve, then call. A burst pipe caught in the first ten minutes is a plumbing repair. Caught in the first ten hours, it is a renovation.
(833) 472-2088