Hello everybody Roger Wakefield coming to you live this morning.
Question of the day is: What do I do in a plumbing emergency?
Guys there's a lot of different plumbing emergencies you can have but let's start off with a life
critical one.
If you have a gas leak and your gas leak is so big that you smell gas everywhere call
the gas company if you don't know how to turn your gas off.
If you do know how to turn your gas off you can save yourself a lot of money.
So what I tell people is look, if you smell gas go outside, turn your gas off first, and
then call a plumber.
Or if you want to try to find the leak you can do that yourself.
But when it comes to gas that't one thing that I do recommend everybody trust to a plumbing
professional.
Here in Texas plumbers locate gas leaks, plumbers repair gas leaks.
The gas company is going to come out, turn your gas off, they're going to put a lock
on it and once they put a lock on it you have to pull a city permit, you have to get it
inspected by a city plumbing inspector and then they'll come back out and turn your gas
on.
This costs home owners money and it costs home owners time.
Nothing wrong with that and I'm saying: If you have a plumbing emergency and you don't
know how to turn your gas off.
Call the gas company immediately.
If you do have a plumber on speed dial on your phone which is something that I recommend
to every body.
Call him.
If you don't know how to turn your gas off see if he can get over there quickly and get
it turned off for you.
Or maybe he can tell you how.
What you're going to do is you're going to go out to your gas meter and on the inlet
side of your meter there's a valve there you want to turn that valve off.
That's going to cut off the gas flow into your house.
So if you have a leak now at least it's stopped.
if you still need to call the gas company, and guys trust me I'm never going to tell
you not to call the gas company, I'm just going to tell you going out there and turning
it off yourself might be something that you can do quicker.
So that's the biggest plumbing emergency.
Now let's go to a water plumbing emergency.
If you have a leak in your house and you have water that you can't stop you need to either
go out to your valve box in your front yard, which is normally right up by the house.
Or go all the way out to the water meter.
But guys this is one of the biggest plumbing tips I give to anybody, and this what helped
American Standard pick me as the next expert plumber is turning off your water to your
house is something that everybody who lives there ought to know how to do.
The reason being is water leak in your house, say you've got a water heater in your attic
and it ruptures or it leaks.
You've got a 3/4 inch water line, or at least a 3/4 inch water line feeding that water heater
and that water is going to run continuously until somebody shuts that water off.
Now if it is your hot water heater leaking or you have a leak on your hot side, normally
you can go to your hot water heater if you've got a ball valve there.
It's a 90 degree turn it's a quick and efficient way to shut off your water heater.
If you've got an old gate valve there you can try it I'm not going to guarantee it'll
work it's a possibility but it's something that you can try and it may shut the water
off.
Even if it doesn't shut it off it may at least slow it down.
Now you can get outside shut the water heater shut the water off at your water main or at
your meter if you need to.
Anything that you can do and as quickly as you can do the less water you have leaking
in your house the less damage you're going to have and the less money it's going to cost
you.
Now the next one is a sewer backup if you've got sewage backing up inside your house the
first thing i tell people is go outside to your two-way clean outs, see if you've got
water there.
If you've got a black gem cap on it, it's going to have a, it's going to be pushing
up if it's backed up between the two-way clean out and the main because of the pressure.
So you want to be real careful taking this off because it's pushing up because there's
pressure on it.
So what I tell people is put your foot on it, loosen the stainless steel band around
it with either a screw driver or a nut driver, loosen that up and then get back out of the
way.
Because when you pull your foot off that chances are that gem cap going to push up and raw
sewage is going to come up.
Now why would I tell people to do this?
now you're letting raw sewage out in your flower bed, your garden, your front yard,
back yard wherever yours is but now that water is not coming out in your house.
I'd rather pay to clean up my flower bed than I would to replace carpet in my master bedroom
because raw sewage was leaking in the master bathroom.
Now if you're leak is up under the house the problem you're going to have there is when
you pull those clean outs you're not going to see water.
At this point you're going to either need to call a plumber or you're going to need
to go to the box store to rent a sewer machine.
If you saw my deal the other day about stopped up sewer be real careful with those machines
they're very dangerous they're not very cheap to rent and if you've got loose clothing like
sleeves on a shirt or gloves or something like that the problem like that you may run
into if it gets caught up in that machine I've seen plumbers break their arm or break
their fingers so be real careful when you're doing stuff like that I don't want you to
hurt yourself.
One thing too, back to the water leak say you've just got water coming up under your
slab guys it's hard to know if it's sewage or water, I recommend to people then go ahead
and turn off your water to the house because if you have a slab leak you know, you're going
to end up needing to do leak detection to find out where it is.
You may need to call for an emergency plumber, getting a plumber out there right then, say
it's the middle of the night it would save you a lot of money to just go shut off the
water to your house and get the plumber out during normal business hours that way you're
not getting hit with emergency plumbing fees.
Guys this is stuff that we deal with everyday, if you ever have any questions please send
me a message, give me shout, let me know what we can do for you.
Let me know if there's something you want to talk about, if you've got questions things
you want to learn about plumbing.
Thank y'all for putting up with me today, we've got a different camera we're set up
down here for Earth Day so I've got all my equipment out there and we're getting ready
to head that way.
But if the videos not as good today the audio quality is not as good guys sorry about that
we'll get back to normal next week.
But I wanted to say thank y'all for putting up with us and thank y'all for sending us
the comments, the messages that y'all do.
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things that they can do and save themselves money.
My name is Roger Wakefield with Texas Green Plumbing, saving you money one drop at a time.