The water heater has let go
Tank rusted through at the base, usually after years of Arizona sediment and scale. Water runs continuously and the volume reaches drywall fast in a closet or garage install.
Water heater repair in Arizona
Emergency plumbing in Arizona, answered at any hour
Burst supply lines, a total loss of water, sewage backing into a shower, a water heater that has split. Tell us what is happening and where you are, and we will connect you with a plumber working near you, tonight if that is what it takes.
Shut the water off first if you can. Then call. We will talk you through the rest.
Answered 24/7, holidays includedDispatched to the closest available plumberHonest arrival window before anyone sets offPrice agreed before work beginsNo hidden fees
On this page
What counts as an emergency, and what genuinely does not
Plenty of companies will send someone out at midnight for a dripping tap because you asked them to. We would rather tell you the truth, because an after-hours call you did not need costs you money and takes a plumber away from someone whose ceiling is coming down.
Four situations get moved to the front of the queue without discussion. Water escaping that you cannot stop. No water at all in the house. Sewage returning into the building through a fixture or floor drain. Anything involving gas, and that one starts with the utility, not with us.
Everything else is a judgement call, and it is one we are happy to make with you on the phone. A toilet you can isolate at the stop valve, a slow drain, a shower that has lost pressure, a water heater making a rumbling noise but still producing hot water: those are real problems with real fixes, and every one of them will be handled more cheaply and more carefully in daylight. We will say that out loud rather than quietly booking the night rate.
The one exception worth knowing
A slab leak is rarely an emergency in the same-hour sense, the water is usually going somewhere other than your flooring. But it is an emergency in the this-week sense, because it runs continuously under concrete and the bill and the damage both compound. If you have a warm spot on the floor and a meter that will not stop, call in the morning, not next month.
The first ten minutes matter more than the next ten hours
What you do before anyone arrives determines how much of this becomes a plumbing repair and how much becomes a restoration project. The order is the same almost every time.
Stop the water. If the leak is clearly at one fixture, shut the stop valve under the sink or behind the toilet. If it is not obviously at one fixture, or the stop valve will not move, go to the main. Do not spend fifteen minutes hunting for the source with water running; shut the whole house down and find it afterwards.
Kill the energy source if the water heater is involved. Electric heater: switch off the dedicated breaker. Gas heater: turn the gas control valve to off. A heater that keeps firing on a tank that has lost water is a separate and worse problem.
Move what you can, then stop. Get boxes, rugs, electronics and anything with feet or paper off the wet floor. Get towels down at thresholds to keep water out of adjoining rooms. Then stop working and photograph everything before you clean up, wide shots and close-ups, including the water line on the baseboard.
Stay out of standing water near anything electrical. If water has reached outlets, a panel, or a garage where the heater and the electrical service share a wall, treat the area as off limits until someone qualified looks at it.
Then call. On the phone we will confirm the water is off, work out what is most likely happening, tell you the realistic arrival window for your community, and stay on the line long enough to talk you through anything else that will limit the damage in the meantime.
Where the shut-offs actually are in an Arizona home
This is where the local specifics start to matter. Almost every Arizona home is slab-on-grade. There is no basement, which means there is no obvious utility room where the main valve sits at eye level with a label on it. Homeowners who have moved here from the Midwest or the Northeast frequently cannot find their shut-off, because they are looking for something that does not exist in this construction.
There are usually two options, and you want to know both before you need either.
The house-side valve
Look at the exterior wall where the water enters, very often near the front hose bib, on the street-facing side. You are looking for either a ball valve with a lever handle or a gate valve with a round wheel, sometimes inside a small plastic or concrete access box set into the ground beside the wall, sometimes inside a garage wall near the water heater. In some newer subdivisions it sits in a wall recess with a removable cover plate.
A quarter turn on a ball valve lever closes it. A gate valve needs several full turns clockwise and may resist; old gate valves in this state seize with mineral scale and sometimes will not close fully or will not reopen afterwards. If yours is a gate valve and it feels frozen, that is worth having replaced with a ball valve on a normal scheduled visit rather than discovering it during a flood.
The meter box at the street
If the house-side valve does not exist or will not move, go to the meter. It is in a rectangular box in the front yard or the sidewalk strip, with a metal or plastic lid. Lift it carefully, scorpions, black widows and the occasional rattlesnake genuinely do shelter in meter boxes in this state, so look before you reach in.
Inside you will see the meter and, on the house side of it, a valve. Many of these need a meter key or a crescent wrench rather than a hand. Turning it clockwise until it stops shuts the property off completely. If you find a locking tab or a curb stop that clearly belongs to the utility, leave that one alone and use the customer-side valve.
If you do one thing after reading this page, go and find your main shut-off while nothing is wrong. Test that it turns. Show one other person in the house. That is the whole exercise, and it saves more water damage than any product you can buy.
Cannot Find Your Shut-Off? Call Us
We can talk you through locating it on the phone while you are standing in the yard.
The overnight pattern
Five calls make up most of what comes in after midnight
Main line backup
Lowest fixture in the house floods while everything else drains. Almost always the main or the lateral, not the fixture. Stop all water use immediately.
Drain cleaning in ArizonaBurst hose bib or washer hose
Two of the most common failures in this climate. Heat and UV age the rubber and the plastic, and both sit under full house pressure with nothing downstream to slow them.
Burst pipe repair in ArizonaNo water at all
Failed pressure regulator, a closed or seized valve, a main line break between the meter and the house, or on a well property a pump or pressure tank fault.
Main water line repair in ArizonaWater appearing with no visible source
Damp at a baseboard, a warm patch of tile, a wet spot on the driveway. Under-slab and buried-line leaks announce themselves indirectly, and locating comes before repairing.
Slab leak detection in ArizonaCall Before It Gets Worse
Small now, or a bigger job later, that is usually the choice.
Response times, honestly, by part of the state
Arizona is enormous and unevenly populated, and any company that promises the same response time in Phoenix and in Peach Springs is not telling you the truth. Here is roughly how it works.
Phoenix metro, East Valley, West Valley
The densest pool of working plumbers in the state. On an active leak or a total loss of water during the day, reaching someone within a couple of hours is normal. Overnight it lengthens but stays measured in hours rather than half a day. Across Phoenix, Scottsdale, Mesa, Chandler, Gilbert, Tempe, Glendale, Peoria, Surprise and Goodyear the practical constraint is traffic more than distance.
Pinal growth corridor
Casa Grande, Maricopa, San Tan Valley, Apache Junction, Florence, Coolidge. Same-day is routine. The wrinkle here is that these communities grew fast and some addresses are a genuine drive from where plumbers are based, so a two-hour window is realistic in the built-up parts and optimistic on the edges.
Tucson metro
Similar to Phoenix in the city and the immediate ring. Marana, Vail, Sahuarita, Green Valley, Catalina. Mount Lemmon is its own case: the road up is long, weather matters, and winter conditions can change the answer entirely.
Yavapai high country
Prescott, Prescott Valley, Sedona, Cottonwood, Camp Verde, Chino Valley, Dewey, the Verde Valley communities. Good daytime coverage. Overnight is thinner, and winter freeze events create clusters where several properties fail on the same night and the queue is real. We will tell you if you are third in line rather than pretending otherwise.
Mohave, La Paz and the river communities
Kingman, Bullhead City, Lake Havasu City, Fort Mohave, Parker, Quartzsite, and smaller places like Meadview, Dolan Springs, Chloride, Yucca, Topock and Peach Springs. Distances between towns are the defining factor. Same-day is usually achievable; overnight coverage in the smallest communities is limited and we will give you a straight answer about it rather than a comforting one.
Monsoon season is its own category of emergency
From roughly July into September, Arizona gets storms that drop a great deal of water in a very short time onto ground that does not absorb it. That produces a specific set of calls that are not really pipe failures at all.
Water finding low points around a foundation. Yard drainage that cannot keep up and starts moving toward the house instead of away from it. And in low-lying areas, sewer surcharge, where the public system briefly fills faster than it can move and pushes back toward the lowest fixtures in nearby buildings. That last one looks exactly like a blocked main line from inside your house, but the cause is outside your property and the fix is not a cable.
The immediate response is identical regardless: stop sending water down the drains, keep people away from it, and call. A plumber can tell a surcharge event from a blocked lateral quickly, and it is worth knowing which one you have before anyone charges you to clear a pipe that was never blocked.
The preventive side is worth a mention because it is cheap. Before the season starts, clear whatever drains around the house of debris, check that the ground still slopes away from the foundation where it should, and if you have had surcharge before, ask a plumber about a backwater valve on the lateral.
Coming home to a house that was closed for the summer
Arizona has an unusually large share of housing that sits empty for months at a time, seasonal residents, second homes, rentals between tenants, snowbird properties across the Valley, the Sun Cities, Green Valley, the river communities and the high country. September and October bring a steady run of the same call: the owner has just walked in and there is water, or there was water for a long time and now there is damage.
What fails in an empty house is not exotic. A washing machine hose, a toilet fill valve that sticks open, a water heater at the end of its life, a supply line at a fitting. In an occupied house any of those is a bad afternoon. In a house nobody has entered since May, the same failure runs for weeks.
If that is what you are looking at right now: shut the main off before anything else, including before you assess the damage or start moving things. Then call. Getting the source stopped and identified is the first move, and it lets remediation on everything else start sooner.
If you are reading this before you leave rather than after you got back, the preparation is genuinely straightforward and worth doing once with a plumber so you have a routine. That is covered properly on the vacant home water shutoff prep page.
Have Someone Check It
Answered around the clock, including tonight and holidays.
What happens when you call
01
We work out what is happening
Plain description is fine. Where you are, whether the water is off, what you can see. A few questions from us and we usually have a working idea of the fault.
02
We give you the real window
Based on your community and the hour, not a generic promise. If it is three hours, you hear three hours. If someone can be there in forty minutes, you hear that.
03
We keep you useful in the meantime
Containment, what to shut off, what to photograph, what to keep people away from. There is usually something worth doing while a plumber is on the road.
04
Price before work, then repair
The plumber assesses on site, gives you a number, and waits for your yes. No work and no charge before you have agreed.
After-hours pricing, and why there are no numbers on this page
Night, weekend and holiday work usually carries a higher rate than the same job on a weekday morning. Pretending otherwise would be dishonest, and it is part of why we tell people when something can genuinely wait.
What does not change with the hour is the sequence. The plumber looks at the actual problem, tells you what it will cost, and does not begin until you have agreed. Nothing is added afterwards, and there is no charge for deciding at that point that you would rather wait or think about it.
We do not publish prices for any service on this site, and that is deliberate rather than evasive. An identical-sounding repair varies enormously with access, pipe material, what is behind the wall, whether the ground is caliche, and what is found once something is open. A number on a web page would either be wrong or so hedged as to be useless.
Questions
Questions people ask at 2am
If yours is not here, the phone is faster than reading. We would rather answer it directly than have you guess.
Ask Us Directly
No obligation to book anything on the call.
Is the phone really answered at 3am, or does it go to a message?
A person picks up. The line is staffed around the clock, every day of the year including holidays, because the failures that cannot wait do not observe business hours. What varies overnight is not whether someone answers but how quickly a plumber can physically get to you, and that depends entirely on where you are.
We tell you the honest window on the call. If the nearest available plumber to a property outside Meadview is two and a half hours out at 3am, you will hear two and a half hours, not "shortly".
What actually counts as an emergency?
Anything where water is escaping and you cannot stop it, anything where you have no water at all, anything where sewage is coming back into the house, and anything involving gas. Those four go out immediately.
A single dripping fixture, a slow shower drain, a running toilet you can shut off at the stop valve, or a water heater that is working but making noise are all genuine problems that will be cheaper and calmer at 8am. We will say so rather than dispatching an after-hours call you did not need.
Where is my shut-off if I live in a slab home with no basement?
Two places to check. Inside or immediately outside, look for a valve on the supply line where it enters the house, very often in the wall near the front hose bib or in a small access box in the ground beside it. If that is not there or will not turn, go to the meter box at the street or in the front yard, usually a concrete or plastic lid marked for water.
The meter box valve often needs a meter key or a crescent wrench and can be stiff after years untouched. Finding it and testing that it turns on a calm Saturday is one of the highest-value fifteen minutes a homeowner in this state can spend.
My water heater is leaking from the bottom. Can it wait until morning?
If it is a slow weep into the drain pan and the pan is draining, usually yes, with the cold inlet shut off. If water is running out of the base of the tank onto the floor, no. A tank that has rusted through does not stop, and in a garage or interior closet installation the volume is enough to reach drywall and flooring within the hour.
Shut off the cold inlet valve on top of the unit, kill the power at the breaker for an electric heater or turn the gas control to off for a gas one, and then call. Do not open the drain valve and walk away unless you have a hose running somewhere sensible.
Sewage is coming up in the shower. What is happening?
When the lowest fixture in the house backs up while others drain, the blockage is downstream of everything, which means the main line or the lateral out to the street rather than one fixture branch. Showers and floor drains are usually the lowest point, so that is where it surfaces.
Stop using water in the house immediately, including the washing machine and dishwasher, because every gallon you send down adds to what comes back up. This is an after-hours dispatch every time, both for the health issue and because the volume increases as long as anyone keeps using fixtures.
Does an after-hours call cost more?
Often yes, and that is worth being straight about. Night, weekend and holiday work generally carries a higher rate than the same job scheduled on a Tuesday morning. What does not change is the sequence: the plumber tells you the number before starting, you approve it, and there are no additions afterwards.
We never quote figures on this site. What we will do on the call is tell you honestly whether the situation warrants the after-hours rate or whether it will genuinely be fine until morning.
I smell gas. Should I be calling you or the gas company?
The gas utility first, and from outside the house. Get everyone out, do not switch lights on or off, do not use the garage door opener, and call your gas provider or 911 from outside. That is not us being cautious for form; it is the correct order.
Once the utility has made the property safe and identified that the fault is on your side of the meter, that is when a plumber who does gas work comes in. Call us at that point and we will get someone out for the repair.
How fast can someone actually reach me?
In the Phoenix and Tucson metros, an active-leak call at a reasonable hour is frequently a same-day and often a within-a-couple-of-hours situation, because there is a dense pool of plumbers already working nearby. In the East and West Valleys and the Pinal corridor it is similar with slightly more drive time.
In the Yavapai high country, along the Colorado River and out in the smaller Mohave and La Paz communities, the map changes. Distances between towns are large, there are fewer plumbers, and overnight coverage is genuinely thinner. Same-day is realistic; a two-hour promise usually is not, and we will not make one.
A monsoon storm has water coming up through a floor drain. Is that a plumbing emergency?
It can be. Heavy monsoon runoff overwhelms drainage, and in low-lying areas it can surcharge the sewer system enough to push back toward the lowest fixtures in a house. That looks and smells like a main line backup but has a different cause and sometimes resolves as the system catches up.
Either way the immediate advice is the same: stop adding water from inside, keep people away from it, and call. A plumber can tell the difference between a surcharge event and a blocked lateral, and only one of those needs a cable or a jetter.
We just got back to a house that was closed for the summer and there is water everywhere.
This is one of the most common calls we take in September and October, and it is why we treat vacant home preparation as a real service rather than a footnote. A supply line, a washer hose, a toilet fill valve or a water heater that fails in an empty house runs unopposed for weeks.
Shut the main off before you do anything else, including before you assess the damage. Then call. The plumbing repair is usually straightforward; the value in calling immediately is getting the source stopped and identified so remediation can start on the rest.
What should I have ready when I call?
The address including the community name, whether the water is currently off, what you can see or hear, and whether anyone in the house needs to avoid the affected area. If you know the age of the house and whether it is on city water or a well, mention it.
You do not need to know the terminology, the pipe material or the diagnosis. "There is water coming out of the wall in the hallway and I have turned it off at the street" is a complete and useful description.
Related
What an emergency call often turns into
Water moving right now? Shut the main, then call.
We answer at any hour, anywhere in Arizona, and we will tell you the truth about how long it takes to get someone to your address.
Call (833) 621-2916
(833) 621-2916 · answered 24/7