It is two in the morning and something is wrong

Call now

Find your row. If you are in this list, it is an emergency and the hour does not matter.

• No water to the house.
• An active leak you cannot stop.
• A burst pipe.
• Sewage coming up into a tub, a shower or a floor drain.
• A water heater leaking from the tank body itself — not from the valve on top, not from a fitting.
• The smell of gas. There is a section below on this one, and it is the only item here where the first call is not to a plumber.
• Water near an electrical panel, an outlet or the service entrance.
• A main line break.

Urgent, but it can wait for daylight

These are real and they should be looked at. None of them is worth an after-hours rate, and a company that tells you otherwise is charging you for the hour rather than the work.

• One fixture clogged while the other drains run fine.
• No hot water, with the cold water behaving normally.
• A toilet running continuously. It is wasting water and money. It is not flooding your house.
• A leaking supply stop that you have managed to shut off.
• A temperature and pressure valve dripping on the water heater. It is telling you something and it should be looked at, but it is not the same as a tank leaking from its body.
• No cooling, in mild weather, when you have somewhere else to be.
• No heat, in mild weather, with blankets in the house.

Book it when it suits you

Nothing here is getting worse tonight.

• A dripping tap.
• A slow drain.
• Low pressure at one fixture.
• A fixture you want replaced.
• A water heater near the end of its life but not leaking.
• Water quality complaints.
• A system due for a service.

Two things that move an item up a list

The lists above are about equipment. These two are about people, and they override the equipment.

• Somebody in the house cannot manage the temperature, or cannot easily leave it. That is a judgement you are entitled to make and we will not argue with it.
• You are not sure. Ring and describe it. Working out which list you are in is free, and it is most of what the first two minutes of the call is for.

If you smell gas, do this and nothing else

Leave the building. Take everyone with you.

Do not switch anything on and do not switch anything off, including lights. Do not use the phone until you are outside.

From outside, call 911 and Dominion Energy. Not a plumber. A plumber comes after the utility has made the property safe, and any plumber who tells you otherwise is one you should not have called.

Find your shut-off before you need it

The standard advice is to check the basement. Here that advice is useless, because St. George is dominated by slab-on-grade construction: no basement, and usually no crawlspace.

There are up to three valves and it is worth knowing all of them.

The first is the curb stop, in a plastic or concrete box at the property line, usually in the park strip or near the pavement. It needs a long T-handled meter key. The valve on the street side of the meter belongs to the city, and for anything on that side you call St. George Water Services on 435-627-4802 rather than a plumber.

The second is your own main shut-off. In a slab-on-grade house in this climate we look in three places first: at or near the front hose bib where the service line comes up through the slab or the wall, sometimes behind a small access panel; in the garage on the wall shared with the front of the house, often near the water heater or the softener loop; or in an interior utility cupboard. That is where we look, not a survey of every house in the county — yours may be somewhere else, which is exactly why finding it on a Saturday beats finding it at two in the morning.

The third is the cold inlet valve on the water heater, plus the angle stop under every sink and toilet. Those isolate one appliance instead of the house, which is often all you need.

• Find it, then tag it. A luggage label and a marker pen. Anyone in the house should be able to find it in the dark.
• Turn it once a year. This is the part nobody does, and here it matters: St. George's own 2024 water quality report puts total dissolved solids between 118 and 936 parts per million, with the 2025 report giving a 580 ppm average. A valve that has not been turned in fifteen years in water like that has a real chance of not turning, or of the stem packing giving way the moment it does.
• If you have a water softener, know whether the shut-off is before or after it. It changes what you isolate.

Water where it should not be, in order

The order matters more than the speed.

• Shut the water off at the main. Everything else is secondary to this.
• If water is anywhere near outlets, a panel or the service entrance, kill power to those circuits from a dry location. If the panel itself is wet, do not approach it. Call the utility.
• Stop the source. On a water heater that means closing the cold inlet and setting the gas control to off.
• Photograph and film everything before you move anything. This is the most skipped step on the list and the one that most often decides how the claim goes. Wide shots and close-ups, the source and every damaged item.
• Get air moving and start drying. Mould colonises wet cellulose in roughly 24 to 48 hours. Drying is genuinely faster here than in most of the country because the ambient humidity is low, but only if the air starts moving immediately.
• Open the claim with your insurer.
• Do not throw away the part that failed. The adjuster will want it, and if there is a claim against the manufacturer it is the evidence.
• Keep every receipt for emergency work.

No cooling: three things to try first

All three are free and none of them needs a tool. Between them they are the whole answer often enough to be worth the two minutes before you pick up the phone.

• The breaker. Check it at the panel and at the disconnect box beside the outdoor unit. Both, not one — the disconnect is the one people forget, and it is the one an electrician or a landscaper is most likely to have switched.
• The thermostat. Batteries, and that it is set to cool rather than to fan.
• The filter. If you cannot see light through it, that is very likely your problem, and it costs a few pounds to fix. A choked filter starves the blower, the coil runs cold, and eventually it ices over and stops cooling altogether.

No heat, and the one thing that is genuinely dangerous

The same three checks apply, and the filter one applies harder: a furnace that keeps shutting itself off part way through a cycle is usually not a broken furnace. It is a limit switch doing exactly its job because the appliance cannot move enough air through itself. The cause is nearly always a filter, a closed-off return, or ductwork that has come apart.

The thing to take seriously is any gas appliance that is producing a smell, soot, or a headache that clears when you leave the room. Carbon monoxide has no smell of its own. If you have an alarm and it sounds, go outside and call from there. If you do not have one, that is the cheapest thing in this entire guide and you should fix it this week.

What actually freezes here, and why the usual advice is wrong

Because winter lows here sit right at freezing rather than well below it, the local failure is exposed above-grade plumbing rather than pipes inside heated walls. A slab-on-grade house with its distribution in the attic does not fail the way a Midwest house fails.

So the national advice — drip your taps, open the cupboard doors under the sinks — is close to irrelevant here. What matters is everything outside the heated envelope.

In rough order: hose bibs, especially non-frost-free ones and frost-free ones left with a hose attached, which traps water past the seat and defeats the whole design. Then backflow assemblies, which sit above grade on the irrigation systems the city requires on every home with outside watering. Then pool and spa equipment. Then attic runs where insulation has been pushed aside by another trade. Then exposed lines in an unheated garage against an outside wall.

• Disconnect the hoses before the season turns. A frost-free bib with a hose on it is not frost-free.
• Winterise the backflow assembly, and know that St. George requires one on all outside watering systems and requires it tested annually.
• Blow out the irrigation zones and winterise the pool equipment.
• Check that the attic insulation still covers the pipe runs after any work in the attic.

What we will tell you on the phone

That it can wait, when it can. If the honest answer is that this holds until morning and the daytime rate is lower, that is what you will hear, and we would rather have that conversation than the invoice.

The fee, before anyone is dispatched. Not on the doorstep.

And if it is a real failure at a bad hour, we will get you through the night first. What we will not do is quote you a replacement system at two in the morning. Nobody makes that decision well at two in the morning, and anybody who wants your signature while you are hot, tired and frightened is not doing you a service.

More under plumbing

• Your backflow test notice, explained
• A pipe broke in the wall of your condo. Who pays?
• What St. George water does to a water heater