Contact Du-West Total Plumbing
Transcripts:
Johann Dutton:
What you’re really looking for is a line just like this that indicates where that shut-off valve is.
Hello, I’m Johann Dutton with Du-West Total Plumbing. So let’s say you’re in this scenario where you’ve done everything you can do to properly prepare for a freeze, and now you went and turned your water on and no water’s coming out of the pipe, and you say, “Uh-oh, something’s happening here. I have a frozen pipe somewhere.”
A good first step to help figuring out what the next phase of that looks like is to get the water shut off to your house. So a lot of times, if you’re in a scenario and it’s an emergency and you start thinking, like, oh my gosh, how do I do this? Where do I do this? Where is it? It’s a whole lot better and a whole lot less stressful if you already know ahead of time where your water main shut-off is and where the shut-off is that’s next to your house.
So in this particular house, you can see that the water main comes up out of the ground and goes into the house above the ground here, which is very typical for the Houston, Texas area. In other parts of the country, sometimes those come in up under the concrete and you never see it. But this is standard practice here, and so usually you can find that on the side of your house somewhere.
Sometimes, these shut-off valves, like what you see on this one here, aren’t readily visible. Either they’re buried in insulation that somebody has insulated on it previously, or they could be down in the ground in a valve box that’s covered up in mulch and you never see it. And so, an alternative place to look for a shut-off valve would be at your water meter that’s usually close to the street.
So in this particular house, this is what your water main looks like, and sometimes the box looks very similar to this. Sometimes it has a little key hole right here, where you have to have a special tool that you can find, typically at your local hardware store that is in the plumbing section, that it has the shape of that key slot on it so that you can get into this box. Usually, on the other side of that tool is a wrench device that can shut off this little 90-degree valve right there.
So a lot of times, when you open these boxes, they are full of mud and you may not be able to see anything. But what you’re really looking for is a line just like this that indicates where that shut-off valve is. And if you turn that guy 90 degrees, it’ll shut off the water flowing in the yard line and up into the house and everything else. And I’ll tell you, if you’re in a freezing condition and you’re not going to be home, it’s a great idea to literally just shut that off and drain the lines out of your pipes in your house, and then you don’t even have to worry about it anymore. But that’s not most people’s reality. Most people living there is we want to be able to use our plumbing, and so just keep an eye on it.
If you run the pipe and the water is not coming out or you start seeing drips in your attic ceiling, you need to be able to get out here quickly, shut this off without a lot of confusion, and then from there, you can call an emergency plumbing service. Here at Du-West, we’re a 24/7 emergency plumbing service. We have on-call year-round, and we can get out to the house and either do a temporary repair if it’s one of these busy times of year where everybody is having plumbing attic issues, or do the permanent repair while we’re there with our fully stocked vans. For more information, you can look online at www.du-west.com.
