Signs You Need An Emergency Plumber | San Antonio, TX
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When it comes to plumbing repair, there’s no such thing as a job that can wait. After all, even a small leak can waste several gallons of water in as little as a week, so if you’ve got even the slightest thing wrong with your pipes, you need to call for plumbing help right away.
But that said, there are some jobs that require much more urgency than others, simply because of the damage they can cause to your San Antonio, TX home. In these situations, you’re going to be relying on your senses to tell you that something’s wrong — because if you don’t pick up on the signs, you’re going to have a serious problem on your hands in a hurry.
Luckily, these signs are pretty hard to miss as long as you know what you’re looking for. If you spot any one of these issues, call an emergency plumber right away!
Standing Water
Before we address why standing water means an emergency, we need to clear up one thing: if there’s standing water in the bathtub or sink, Drano is NOT a solution to this problem. In fact, you should never pour Drano or any other corrosive product into standing water because doing so will create a biohazard. These types of cleaners should only be used on a drain that’s free of water, and even then, it’s usually not recommended.
Instead of damaging your pipes and walling off your bathroom, do the best thing and call for an emergency plumber. There might be several reasons you have standing water in your home. If it’s in the bathtub, there might be a blockage in your pipes or a sewage backup. If you’ve got water in your basement, there’s a good chance that a pipe burst. In either case, you need to call for help right away and minimize the damage. Calling for a plumber can help you find the problem and keep the damage from getting even worse.
Consistent Toilet Clogs
This might surprise you, but home owners in San Antonio, TX and across the world put a lot of things down their toilets that have absolutely no business going down them. Nearly every emergency plumber has some kind of horror story about a strange item that went down the toilet because of a home owner’s mistake, and they’ve seen clogs caused by everything from diapers to dental floss to coffee grounds to flushable wipes (which aren’t the slightest bit flushable).
The only things that should be going down your toilet are human waste and toilet paper, and while these things can clog your toilet if there’s too much of either, a simple plunge will do the trick with these. That’s because both are meant to break down in water, so even if it takes a few extra minutes, they’re going to break apart and slide down your pipes normally.
Other household items aren’t going to dissolve in water, so they’re not going to break down. Call an emergency plumber immediately, especially if the item in question was something that’s made to absorb water.
Lack of Hot Water
When you don’t have hot water in the shower, there are three options. The first is that your water supplier is having issues, which means the problem is already being taken care of and should be fixed soon. The other two are decidedly less straightforward. Either you’ve got a problem with your water heater, or you’ve got a problem with a pipe leaking.
If you have a traditional water heater, it’s literally always in operation, so if you don’t have hot water, that should be the first place you look. But in either case, it’s smart to just call an emergency plumber and make sure you have someone who knows what they’re looking for in order to solve the problem. After all, there’s nothing worse than not being able to take a warm, relaxing shower — to say nothing of doing dishes, laundry or cooking!
Strange or Foul Smells
When you notice a smell coming from your water, it’s important to first identify the smell. If it smells like rotten eggs, call your water supplier first. In that case, there was probably an issue with your water supply that’s recently been fixed, and you’ll need to push the bad water out of your pipes. That’s an issue you can take care of in about a half-hour.
If the smell is more like something decomposing, such as sewage, that’s a serious problem. This means you’ve likely got a backup somewhere in your pipes, and you don’t have much time before sewage starts to overflow in a place you really don’t want it. This isn’t something to wait around for; you need to call for an emergency plumber to visit your home immediately.
Low Water Pressure
Is the water flowing a lot more slowly than usual? Again, you have two likely culprits here. If you’ve turned off the back-up valve recently, check to make sure that you turned it on all the way when you restored it. If that’s not it, it’s time to call an emergency plumber, because there’s a good chance that you’ve got a leak somewhere in your plumbing system.
Your pipes rely on a constant stream of water to produce enough water pressure for your shower or your kitchen faucet, and if there’s a hole in a pipe, you’re not going to have as strong a stream as you need. You also won’t be able to find the pipe on your own unless you’re very lucky, so it’s wise to call for help from an emergency plumber.
At bluefrog Plumbing + Drain of San Antonio, we’ve got the knowledge needed to find hidden plumbing problems and repair the damage before things really get out of hand. Be sure to contact our team when you need an emergency plumber; we’ll spot the issue and provide a quality repair that’s done right the first time!
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