Burst Pipe

When this becomes an emergency

• Water coming through a basement ceiling from the floor above.
• A loud crack from a wall during a cold snap, followed by running water.
• Ice on the outside of a pipe where it passes an outside wall.
• One faucet dead while the rest of the house still has pressure.

What a pro does

Kentucky and southern Indiana get real winter, and the pipes that fail here are usually the ones somebody ran through a space that was never meant to hold plumbing. Old Louisville and Germantown are full of houses where a bathroom was added off the back porch in 1948, and that line runs through a stud bay with the outside wall on one side of it. Across the river, houses in New Albany and Jeffersonville have the same story. So the plumber kills the water, then goes looking at the cold edges of the building rather than the middle. In a deep basement the split is often visible right away, sometimes still spraying. Inside a wall it takes tracing. Repairs get matched to what's in the house, and that matters here, because a lot of these homes carry three generations of pipe in one run: original galvanized, copper from a mid-century remodel, and whatever the last owner did. Joining materials badly is how you create the next leak, so the fittings are chosen deliberately and the whole section gets pressure tested before the wall goes back.

Frequently asked questions

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