Burst supply pipe
A split line under pressure, indoors or buried. Isolated, cut out and replaced rather than patched over.
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An emergency plumber in Durban should start by getting the water off, not by getting in a van. Send a request and the first thing you get back is how to stop it where you are, then a straight answer on whether someone is coming tonight or at first light.
Say what is happening and whether the water is off yet. If it is not, that is the first thing we deal with when we come back to you, before anything else is discussed.
Broadly: water that is damaging the building, or no water at all. Everything else is usually better and cheaper done in daylight.
A split line under pressure, indoors or buried. Isolated, cut out and replaced rather than patched over.
A cylinder that has gone and is emptying into a ceiling. Isolated first, then dealt with properly.
A blockage forcing waste into the house is a health problem, not an inconvenience, and it does not wait.
Established first as a supply interruption or a fault on your property, because only one of those is ours to fix.
A seized boundary tap turns a small leak into an uncontrollable one. Replaced so the next event is survivable.
With the uplift stated up front, before anyone is dispatched, so the invoice holds no surprises.
There is a pattern in when things go wrong here, and it is not random. eThekwini's published rationing windows have run from 8pm to 4am across the south and south west, with parts of Westville off from 8pm until 5am. Supply is deliberately shut down to let reservoirs recover, and then it is turned back on again.
The moment of restoration is the most violent thing that happens to a domestic water system all day. An empty main is full of air. When the water returns it compresses that air ahead of itself, drives it through the network, and delivers a pressure spike at the instant the last of it clears. The City has seen what this does at scale: 72 air valves were damaged on the 32km line from Durban Heights to Phoenix after Reservoir 3 was brought back into service, and 60 replacements had to be ordered.
So a joint that has been weakening quietly for two years does not usually fail while you are running a bath. It fails at four in the morning, when the refill arrives and the house is asleep. That is a specific and unlucky combination, because it means the water has a clear run. Nobody hears the first hour. A burst that would have been a bucket if it were caught immediately becomes a ceiling by the time an alarm goes off.
This changes what is worth doing in advance rather than what to do afterwards. Knowing exactly where your stopcock is, and knowing that it actually turns, is worth more in Durban than almost anywhere else, because the thing most likely to need it will happen while you are unconscious. A boundary tap that has not been moved in a decade has usually seized, and you find that out at the worst imaginable moment.
Go and turn your stopcock off and on again this week. If it moves, you know. If it does not, that is a small planned job now instead of a catastrophe later. And on any morning after an outage, walk the property before you leave: a quick look at the meter, the ceilings and the ground around the supply run will catch a four o'clock failure before it has had a full day to run.
In this order. The first two matter more than anything a plumber does later.
The parts of an out-of-hours request that are actually within anyone's control.
Before anything else, you are walked through isolating it. That is free and it is usually worth more than the visit.
Call-out, hourly and after-hours premium as three numbers, agreed before a van moves.
Itemised, dated to the day the work happened, with the failed part described. Insurers ask for exactly that.
If a night repair is a hold until daylight, it is called that on the invoice rather than sold as finished.
Cost first, then the things worth knowing before you need them.
More than the same job on a Tuesday morning, and you should be told how much more before anyone leaves. The trade's published national guidance is a R450 to R650 call-out and R450 to R850 an hour excluding VAT, and after-hours work carries a premium on top of that. What matters is that the premium is stated up front rather than appearing on the invoice as a surprise. Ask for the call-out figure, the hourly figure and the after-hours uplift as three separate numbers, and get them before you agree to a visit. Our prices page sets out how the whole thing is built up.
Find the stopcock before you need it, because looking for it while a ceiling fills is the worst possible time. On most Durban properties there are two: a tap on your side of the municipal meter at the boundary, and often an isolating valve where the supply enters the house. Turn the boundary one clockwise until it stops. If it will not move, do not force it into a broken spindle. Go to the geyser instead and close the isolator on its cold inlet, and open every hot tap in the house to drain the pressure out of the system.
It is a fair question to ask anybody, and the honest version is this. Out of hours a request reaches a person, and that person tells you whether somebody is coming tonight or first thing in the morning. If the answer is first thing, you get talked through shutting the water down and limiting the damage so the wait costs you as little as possible. A straight answer at ten at night is worth more than a promise that turns into an argument, and our published hours are in the footer rather than buried.
Shut it off immediately and then it can usually wait. A geyser holds 100 to 200 litres and sits above your ceiling, so the urgent part is stopping the supply to it, not replacing it at midnight. Close the isolator on the cold inlet, switch the geyser off at the distribution board, and open a hot tap to relieve what is left. Once it is isolated and draining, the damage stops climbing and a repair or replacement in daylight will be better work and a smaller bill.
Electricity before water. Switch off the circuit for that part of the house at the distribution board, because a soaked ceiling and live lighting are a far more serious problem than the water itself. Then shut the supply off. Then, if the ceiling is bulging, put a bucket under the lowest point of the bulge and make a small hole in it with a screwdriver to let the water out in a controlled way. A ceiling that is allowed to fill comes down all at once, and that is when it takes the light fitting and anything underneath with it.
Stop the water and move what you can, but photograph it before you clean it. Insurers assess on evidence, and a phone photograph of the damage while it is happening, with a timestamp on it, is worth a great deal more than a description afterwards. Take the wide shot and the close one, and keep the failed part if it comes out. Then get the water out, because standing water in a Durban summer starts causing a second, slower problem within a day or two.
Because that is when the water comes back. eThekwini's published rationing windows have run to 4am in the south and south west and to 5am in parts of Westville, so restoration lands in the small hours. The refill is the moment of highest stress on the system, and a joint that has been weakened will often go exactly then, with the household asleep and nobody to hear it. It is also why a burst discovered at seven in the morning has frequently been running for three hours.
The call-out covers getting to you and looking, so it applies whether or not the news is good. What we will not do is invent work to justify the trip. If the answer is that a valve needed closing, or that the problem is on the municipal side of the meter and is eThekwini's to fix, then that is what you are told and that is what goes on the invoice. Telling somebody there is nothing wrong is part of the job, and it is the part that makes the rest of it worth believing.
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If water is running now, get it shut off first and send this second. Tell us the suburb and what is happening and you will get a time and a figure.