If water is running right now
Turn it off at the meter. The water meter is at the front boundary of the property, usually in a green or black box near the verge. There is a tap beside it. Turning that closes the whole property down and stops the damage where it is.
That is the one thing worth doing before you ring. Everything after it is ours.
If you cannot get to the meter, cannot turn it, or the water is coming from a gas or hot water appliance, leave it and call.
If you can smell gas
Get everyone out of the house first. Do not switch anything on or off, do not light anything, and do not go looking for it. Once you are outside, ring us — gas work here is done under gas licence 13098, held by the person who attends.
What counts as an emergency here
A burst pipe
Mains pressure water into a wall, a ceiling, a cupboard or a slab. The damage curve on these is steep — an hour matters.
A service line that has broken open
On a Bull Creek block the run from the meter to the house is long and buried. When one of those goes it can push water up through a lawn, a driveway or a garden bed with real force.
Water into the ceiling
A ceiling holding water is a safety problem before it is a plumbing one. Stay out from under it.
A drain backing up into the house
Waste water coming back up a floor waste or a shower is not something to wait out. Blocked drains
A suspected gas leak
Always. No exceptions.
A leak you have just found under the house or slab
If it is running hard enough to be doing damage, treat it as an emergency and shut the water off. If it is slow and hidden, it is a detection job instead. Leak detection
When we can get there
Monday to Friday, 7:00am to 4:00pm. That is when we work, and we would rather tell you that plainly than have you sit waiting on a Sunday for someone who is not coming.
Inside those hours, an emergency goes to the front. Quick response is part of what we offer and a burst pipe is exactly the job it is for. Ring and we will tell you honestly where you sit in the day rather than booking you and hoping.
If it is outside our hours and water is running, shut it off at the meter. A property with the water off is stable. It is inconvenient for a night, and it is a great deal cheaper than a night of mains pressure into a wall cavity.
Why Bull Creek gets these calls
Most of Bull Creek went up through the 1970s, after the Kwinana Freeway reached the area in 1976. Buried pipework of that age has had five decades of ground movement, root pressure and daily pressure cycling working on it.
Nothing fails all at once. A joint weeps, then seeps, then opens. The reason a burst so often feels like it came out of nowhere is that the earlier stages of it were happening underground in sand, where there was nothing to see. That is also why a mystery water bill is worth taking seriously — it is frequently the same fault, six months earlier and much cheaper to deal with. What a jump in the bill usually means
What happens when we arrive
We stop the water
Or confirm you already have, and isolate just the failed section so the rest of the house can go back on.
We find the break
On an exposed pipe that is immediate. On a buried or concealed one, the same locating work applies — isolate, pressure test, listen, mark. How a leak is located
You get a written price
Even on an emergency. You are told what the repair is and what it costs before it starts. Transparent pricing, no hidden costs.
We repair it
Then the section is brought back up to pressure and checked under load before we leave.
What it costs to call us out
Nothing. The $0 call-out fee applies to emergency work the same as everything else, and the quote is free. If the answer turns out to be a five-minute isolation and a conversation about what to do next, that is what you get.
Who fixes what
Water Corporation looks after the main and the meter. Everything on your side of the meter — the service line under the lawn, the pipework under the slab, the taps and the fittings — is the property owner's to arrange and repair, and it has to be done by a licensed plumber. That is worth knowing before you ring the wrong number on a bad morning.
Licences
Plumbing licence 8396. Gas licence 13098. Both held by Tim, who does the work. Gas work is not subcontracted out to someone else.