Five Plumbing Emergencies We See Every Week in Sydney That Could Have Been Prevented

Sydney plumbing emergencies happen every day and we’re available to assist 24/7. The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of them weren’t necessary. The top five most frequent preventable emergencies and what each of them would have been thwarted by.

There’s another version of this article that will say to you do scheduled maintenance and be aware of the things you put down the drains. You have been reading that article for about a dozen times. It has done nothing to change the way you act and it has not saved one call out.

Instead we have compiled a list of five actual emergencies we service regularly throughout Sydney, actual damage observed, actual costs incurred, and the one thing that could’ve saved each of these. Not vague advice. One thing each situation. Five things total. With them, you have taken care of most of the potential plumbing problems in your house that you could have avoided.

While Nobody Was In The House, The Burst Flexi Hose Fired A Rocket!

What happened: A family in the Eastern Suburbs left for a weekend away. On Saturday something happened to a braided flexi hose under the kitchen sink that caused it to burst. When they came back in Sunday evening the kitchen floor was soaking, the water had filtered down through the subfloor to the rooms below, and the timber floors all along the ground floor had started to warp. The insurance claim was more than $30,000.

What could have averted it: The flexi hoses were 11-years-old, four years too old to be replaced. The steel braid was corroded because of the moisture accumulations under the sink over several years. They were never checked by anyone since no one knew they needed checking.

One thing: Replace flexi hoses after 5-7 years. The cost is about a few hundred dollars and it only takes about an hour for a plumber. Write on your calendar. It’s the cure for the #1 cause of internal water damage claims in Australian homes.

The Sewer Backup in the Ground-Floor Apartment

The problem: An inner-city apartment unit had a backup of sewage in the bathroom floor drain that was in the ground floor of the building. The entire bathroom area proved to be contaminated. The odor permeated the unit and from it into the corridor. For 2 days the resident was unable to use the bathroom until the stack was cleaned out.

The cause: When we jetted and camera inspected our sewer shared, dozens of wet wipes were causing the blockage, which had taken weeks to form when it finally reached a point at a horizontal turn in the pipe that blocked it.

The only thing: Do not flush wet-wipes down. Not those that are labeled “flushable.” Not the baby wipes. Don’t use cleaning wipes. None of them. Unlike toilet paper, they will not dissolve in the water, and with grease in the sewer create the most common blockage we see in apartment buildings, particularly in a shared sewer stack. Bin them. Every time.

The Gas Leak Nobody Mentioned

What was reported: When the couple the plumber was servicing for hot water in Woollahra used to talk to us about our service they reported “a faint whiff of something” going on near the cooktop for weeks. They had assumed that it was due to the cooktop burner not lighting cleanly. We put out a call to test a gas detector, which we used and found that the flexible gas hose (not a big leak, but there was some leak) behind the cooktop leaked. This hose was from a kitchen remodel performed 12 years before.

What would have saved it: Gas hoses are marked with a use by date–usually 10 years from the date of manufacture. This one had exceeded its SBP as the rubber on the connection piece had deteriorated.

Q. ONE thing: Remove a stove top or let a plumber remove it and inspect the gas hose between the stove top and the back of the cooktop. If the hose has a date stamped on it and the date is older than 10 years, replace the hose. If it doesn’t have a date, replace it with a new hose. The price for replacing a gas hose is approximately $100 to $150 for installation. Gas explosions aren’t to be taken lightly.

Severe Tree Root Infiltration

What happened: A homeowner in Randwick had been hiring a plumber to have their sewer drain cleaned every 6-8 months for 3 years. Each time he/she would come in and jet the drain, clean out the roots, and leave. As if on schedule, the problem came back. When they called, they had cleared them so many times already that they had spent more than $2000.

The cause: This was due to roots from a Moreton Bay fig tree in the nature strip penetrating the terracotta sewer pipe, via two cracks approximately 6 metres from the residence. These root holes were kept open by jetting the roots back every time. Within a couple of months the roots came back.

The one thing: Once you have cleared a clog at the root always have a CCTV camera inspection of the pipe. When the camera identifies cracked joints or root entry points, relining the damaged area does an effective seal of these entry points that will be permanent. A reline is approximately as expensive as two to three years of re-jet and removes the issue once and for all, has a 35 year plus warranty. Treatment/cure without inspection is clearing without healing the cause which remains beneath the surface.

Evacuating That Leaky Hot Water Tank In Your Apartment Has Created A Mess In The Apartment Underneath

What happened: An electric hot water tank had been built in an apartment in Potts Point 13 years ago. It had never even had a service. The “sacrificial anode rod” used to safeguard the steel tank against corrosion was totally used up years ago. Anode was missing and tank was corroding from the inside. One morning the bottom of the tank collapsed. Hot water from their apartment poured onto the laundry floor, through the slab and into the apartment below, resulting in damage to the resident’s ceiling, bathroom cabinetry and bedroom carpet.

One thing: Check the anode rod every three to five years in your hot water tank and replace it once it is “used up.” The anode check costs will be approximately $100. Replacement anodes will go for $150 to $250 when installed. The lost tank was a $1,800 replacement tank and there was the insurance excess on top of this, plus the disruption of weeks for both apartments to the homeowner. If the anode had been tested every four years, this tank would still have been useful for 4-8 years.

The Pattern

In all these cases, there is the same underlying theme, a component that had a known life cycle had been neglected until it failed. Flexi hoses. Gas hoses. Pipe joints. Anode rods. All these failures could be seen. These were all foreseeable. And to prevent each of them took just one small action, at the right time and for the low, low cost.

When you experience a plumbing emergency, it can feel like it’s just a random event that occurred. From our end, coming back to the same sort of mistakes week after week, well, it’s anything but. The majority are from components that were never checked, replaced and never maintained until they failed catastrophically.

Five things. Cost to avoid all five: approximately $500-$800 over several years. When all of the above go wrong: easily, up to $50,000+ in damages, insurance claims, lost man hours, and stress. There is no tricky maths. The maintenance is even easier.