How to Stop an Escape of Water at Home: The First Ten Minutes

Minutes 0 to 2: stop the water at the stop tap

Thames Water says the stop valve is usually under the kitchen sink and that turning it clockwise stops the water. Closing it cuts the mains supply to the taps and appliances in the house. Do this before looking for the source. Every minute the supply stays open adds to the damage. The plain meaning of the term is in escape of water.

If you do not know where the stop tap is, look in the places a supply pipe enters the house: under the kitchen sink, in a utility room, in a cupboard under the stairs, or near the front door. A stop tap that has not been turned for years can seize. If yours does not move with firm hand pressure, do not use a wrench on it, because that risks cracking the pipe it sits on. Close the isolation valve on the appliance or fitting that is leaking, if it has one, and ask a plumber to free the stop tap afterwards.

Minutes 2 to 5: switch off the heating and drain the pipes

Thames Water’s burst pipe advice is to turn off the heating and open all the taps to drain the system. With the stop tap closed, opening the cold taps lets the water already in the pipes run out, so less of it can reach a split pipe.

Start with the taps closest to the leak, then work upstairs. Leave them open until they stop running. If the house has a loft tank, it keeps feeding the taps after the stop tap is shut, so open the taps until the flow stops completely, and do not flush toilets that sit above a wet ceiling.

• Close the stop tap, then switch off the heating at the boiler or programmer.
• Open every cold tap and run them until they stop, upstairs first if the leak is coming through a ceiling.
• Do not switch the heating or an immersion heater back on until the source is known.
• Leave the bath and basin plugs out so any water left in them has somewhere to go.

Minutes 5 to 10: protect and photograph

Soak up standing water with towels and move furniture, rugs and electrical items out of the wet area. Lift paperwork, photographs and bedding first, because they absorb water fastest. If a ceiling is bulging, do not stand under it. Water held in a ceiling can come down at once, so leave it alone. Damage to walls, ceilings and finishes is quoted by a partner team of builders and decorators, who give a price for each job; see leak damage repair and remediation.

Before you clear anything, take photographs: the wet area from the doorway, each stained surface close up, the floor, and anything damaged. Add a short video that pans across the room. These are for your insurer, and they also help anyone who later has to find the source, because a stain’s shape and the order it appeared in say a lot about where the water came from.

Thames Water suggests checking whether your home insurance covers leaks and bursts, and a guide from the Association of British Insurers says to contact your insurer as soon as possible so it can advise and arrange repairs. Keep the call short and factual: what happened, when you noticed, and that you have shut off the water.

What stopping the water does and does not tell you

With the stop tap closed, a stain that stops growing was fed by pressurised supply pipework, or by an appliance connected to it. A stain that keeps spreading with the supply off is being fed by something else: the heating circuit, a waste pipe, rainwater, or water that has already soaked into the fabric and is still moving. The guide to where leaking water travels explains why the wet patch is often a long way from the source.

That is the point where checking by eye runs out. A pipe inside a wall or beneath a floor cannot be inspected without opening it, and the usual next step is to find the exact spot first with instruments, before anything is cut. The water leak you cannot find guide covers what a survey does. For one property that visit is the £580 fixed-price package. No VAT is charged. No find, no fee applies when a live leak inside your own property cannot be located.

Locating the leak comes first. A small repair, such as tightening a fitting or replacing a small part on the pipe, can be done on the same visit once the leak is found, and a larger repair is quoted before any work starts, and the leak is stopped in the meantime; see leak repair after detection. Do not turn the supply back on until the burst or split pipe has been dealt with (the hidden damage a burst pipe leaves behind often shows up days later), as Thames Water advises keeping the water off until a leak is fixed.

Once the emergency is over

Make the stop tap easy to reach and test it twice a year. A stop tap you can close in two seconds is the most useful single habit a household can have, and the habits in preventing escape of water build on it. A battery sensor in the places that flooded gives you an alert next time; see where to place water leak sensors. If the escape came from a washing machine or tap connector, the page on replacing flexible hoses explains how often they need changing.

Sources

Thames Water, frozen or burst pipes (stop valve, heating, draining, insurance, electrics), read in October 2026.

Association of British Insurers, guidance on escape of water republished on a water-industry register blog (turn off the water, contact the insurer), read in October 2026.