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Plumbing Problems

Burst Pipe

If water is running right now, stop reading and go shut off your main water valve. Every minute it runs is more subfloor, more drywall, more insulation. The rest of this page will still be here once the water is off.

Do These Three Things, In This Order

A burst supply line does not slow down on its own. A half-inch split under a house can move a lot of water in an hour, and it will keep moving it until somebody closes a valve. The pipe repair is the cheap part of this. What the water touches on the way out is the expensive part. So the order below matters.

  1. Shut off the main water valve.

    Your main is wherever the water enters the house. In this area that is usually in the crawlspace near the front wall, in a utility closet or laundry room, or out at the meter box near the road. If you are on a well, the shut-off is normally right after the pressure tank. Find it now, before you need to think about it.

    Two kinds of valves. A ball valve has a lever handle and takes a quarter turn: handle lined up with the pipe is open, handle crossways to the pipe is closed. A gate valve has a round wheel and takes several full turns clockwise. Old gate valves seize up. If the wheel will not budge, do not force it hard enough to snap the stem, go to the meter box at the road instead. That one takes a meter key, and a large flathead or a pair of channel locks will usually get it. Once the water is off, open the lowest faucet in the house, a basement sink or an outside spigot, to drain the pipes and drop the pressure. Not sure where any of this is? Here is how to find and shut off your water main, with the valve types laid out.

  2. Cut the power to anything the water is near.

    If water is running near outlets, running down an interior wall, standing anywhere close to the breaker panel, or pooling around a furnace or an electric water heater, kill those circuits at the breaker. Water plus energized wiring is the part of this that hurts people, not the flooding.

    One hard rule: if you would have to stand in water to reach the panel, or the panel itself is wet, do not touch it. Back out and call the power company to pull the meter. Nothing in your house is worth that. If it is clearly dry underfoot and the panel is dry, flip the affected breakers, or the main if you are not sure which ones they are.

  3. Call or text (706) 669-5727.

    Ryan answers his own phone, 24/7, and he will tell you straight what it sounds like from your description. Text is often the faster way to reach him up in the mountains where service drops out, and you can send a photo of the pipe, which helps a lot. Free estimate, no trip fee, no diagnostic fee. See the emergency plumbing page for how the callout works.

While you wait: get photos and a short video of the water and the damage before you start cleaning anything up. Take them from a few angles. Then move what you can out of the water. And if the house water is now off, switch your water heater off too, at the breaker for an electric unit or the gas valve for a gas one. If somebody opens a hot tap while the tank cannot refill, an electric heater will run the elements dry and burn them out, and now you have two repairs instead of one.

Why a Frozen Pipe Actually Bursts

Almost everybody has the mechanism wrong, and the wrong version leads people to check the wrong spot.

Water is unusual: it expands about 9 percent when it turns to ice. So the assumption is that the ice swells and splits the pipe from the inside, right where the ice is. That is not typically what happens. Copper and PEX have enough give to take the ice itself. What kills the pipe is the water that is not frozen.

Here is the real sequence. An ice plug forms at the coldest point in the run, usually where the pipe crosses an unheated crawlspace or the back of an exterior wall. The plug grows and pushes a column of liquid water ahead of it, toward the fixture. The faucet at the end is closed. That trapped water has nowhere to go and it does not compress. Pressure in that short section climbs to numbers no residential pipe is rated for, and the pipe splits at the weakest point in that stretch. Which is downstream of the ice, sometimes several feet away from it, and often not even cold to the touch.

Two things follow from that. First, this is exactly why a dripping faucet works during a hard freeze: the open tap gives that pressure somewhere to escape, so it never builds. It is not the trickle of water keeping the pipe warm, it is the open path. Second, and this is the one that surprises people, the pipe usually splits while it is still frozen and you hear nothing. The ice is plugging its own wound. The flood starts on the thaw, when the plug melts and the split is suddenly wide open with full house pressure behind it. Plenty of these calls come in on the warm afternoon after the cold snap, not during it.

Bursts That Have Nothing to Do With Cold

Freezing gets the blame, but a good share of the burst pipes around here let go in July. The causes are slower and they give warning if you know what you are looking at.

  • Corroded galvanized steel. Older homes still have it. Galvanized rusts from the inside out, so the pipe looks fine from the outside while the wall thins for decades. Then a section blows. The problem is that every other foot of that pipe is the same age and the same water, so a patch just moves the next failure down the line. Rusty water at the tap and pressure that has dropped off over the years are the tells. This is where repiping stops being optional.
  • Polybutylene. Gray or sometimes blue flexible plastic pipe, common in homes plumbed from roughly the late 1970s into the mid 1990s. Chlorine in the water breaks it down from the inside. It fails with no warning at all, frequently at the fittings, and it fails after it has already looked fine for years. If you have poly, you are on borrowed time and no repair changes that.
  • Water pressure above 80 PSI. Residential plumbing wants 40 to 80 PSI. Run it above 80 and you are working every joint, fitting, supply line, and the water heater harder than they were built for, every single day. It shows up as a burst at a weak fitting. A gauge that screws onto a hose bib costs a few dollars and gives you a real number. On city water, a pressure reducing valve that has failed will pass street pressure straight into the house. On well water, the pressure switch settings control it. Either way, if you are reading high, that is a fixable thing and worth fixing before it picks the spot for you. Related: low water pressure is the same system telling you the opposite story.
  • Physical damage. A drywall screw or a trim nail driven into a stud and through a pipe behind it. A crawlspace pier that has settled and put a hard bend in a run. Something heavy set down on a line under the house. These usually weep first and fail later, so a stain on a ceiling or a soft spot in a floor is worth chasing down now rather than after.

Why Homes Up Here Take the Worst of It

North Georgia mountain homes are built in a way that puts pipe in the cold, and then we get winters that find it.

Crawlspaces are the first reason. A lot of houses around Ellijay, Blue Ridge, and Suches sit on a crawlspace or piers instead of a slab, so the supply lines run through open space under the floor with vents letting outside air move right across them. A vented crawlspace tracks the outdoor temperature, not the temperature of the house above it. Your thermostat says 70 and means nothing to the pipe under your bathroom.

Exterior walls are the second. A pipe run through an outside wall has nothing between it and the weather but whatever insulation the builder put behind it, and the insulation is usually behind the pipe rather than in front of it. Kitchen sinks on an outside wall are a classic version of this.

Elevation is the third. Up on the ridge it gets colder than whatever the forecast says for the towns down in the valley, and it stays colder longer. A night in the teens is a normal winter night here, not an event.

The fourth reason is the one that does the real damage: cabins and seasonal homes. Around Ellijay and Blue Ridge, a lot of houses sit empty for weeks at a time. A pipe splits during a January cold snap and there is nobody in the house to hear it, nobody to shut the valve, nobody to notice for days. On city water it runs until the meter gets shut off. On a well, the pump keeps right on pumping, cycling over and over, until somebody arrives or the pump itself burns up. We have walked into places where the water had been running since before Christmas. The pipe was a small repair. The subfloor, the insulation, the flooring, the drywall, and the mold behind it were not.

If you own a place that sits empty in the winter, the fix is upstream of all of this: shut the water off at the main and drain the system when you leave, or have somebody check it. Winterizing pipes in North Georgia covers what that actually involves. If a pipe is frozen but has not let go yet, go to frozen pipes instead, because you still have options.

Safe to Handle Yourself vs. Call Now

The homeowner steps on this one genuinely matter. Shutting the main and killing the breaker are the two moves that decide how expensive this gets, and they happen before a plumber can physically get to you. Do them.

Do this yourself

  • Shut off the main water valve, or the meter at the road if the house valve will not turn.
  • Open the lowest faucet in the house to drain the lines and relieve pressure.
  • Cut power at the breaker to any circuit the water is near, as long as you are on dry footing and the panel is dry.
  • Shut off the water heater at its breaker or gas valve while the house water is off.
  • Photograph and video everything before you clean it up.
  • Move furniture, boxes, and anything else out of the water, and get air moving.

Stop here and call

  • The actual pipe repair. Cutting out the split section and putting in new pipe means sweating copper, crimping PEX, or threading galvanized, and doing it right in a crawlspace where you cannot stand up.
  • Anything involving a torch near framing and old insulation. Plumbers set houses on fire doing this carelessly. It is a real risk, not a disclaimer.
  • Push-fit couplings and pipe tape from the hardware store. These hold long enough to make you think it is fixed, then let go behind a finished wall six months later. That is not a repair, it is a delay with a worse ending.
  • Any burst inside a wall or ceiling, on a gas line, or on a well line between the pump and the pressure tank.
  • Standing water near the panel, or a wet panel. Power company, not you, not us.

Georgia requires a license for the repair itself, and Ryan Chastain holds a Master Plumber license, MPR108473. Frozen and burst pipe repair is work he does regularly through the winter. Workmanship is guaranteed on every job. He answers his own phone and he is often the one who shows up.

Common Questions About Burst Pipes

How much does a burst pipe repair cost?

Emergency plumbing runs about $500 to $2,000. Where a specific job lands depends mostly on access: a split in an open crawlspace is the low end, and a pipe inside a finished wall or ceiling that has to be opened up to reach is the high end. The estimate is free, there is no trip fee, and there is no diagnostic fee, so you find out the number before anybody starts.

My pipe is frozen but has not burst yet. What do I do?

Open the faucet that pipe feeds so the pressure has an escape, then warm the frozen section slowly with a hair dryer or a space heater, working from the faucet end back toward the ice. Never use a torch or an open flame. Keep your hand on the main shut-off while you do it, because a pipe that has already split will start pouring the moment the ice lets go.

Can I patch a burst pipe myself until a plumber gets here?

Do not bother, and do not turn the water back on to test a patch. Once the main is off, the emergency is over and the pipe can wait a few hours. Tape and clamp kits under full house pressure fail, usually at the worst possible moment, and a hardware store push fit coupling that lets go later behind drywall costs you more than the original repair did.

A cabin sat empty and the water has been running for days. How bad is it?

The pipe is the small part. Water running unattended for days soaks subfloor, insulation, drywall, and flooring, and mold starts in behind it. Shut the water off, cut power to the affected areas, photograph everything for your carrier, and call. We repair the pipe and tell you honestly what else the water reached.

Do you come out at night and on weekends for this?

Yes. Emergency service is 24/7 and a burst pipe is exactly what that is for. Texting (706) 669-5727 is usually the fastest way to reach Ryan, especially in the parts of the mountains where cell service is thin, and you can send a photo of the pipe along with it.

More on the problems that sit next to this one:

Water Is Off. Now Get It Fixed.

Call or text. A real person answers, day or night. Free estimate, no trip fee.

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