How to Stop an Escape of Water

Stop it in this order

1. If water is running onto or through anything electrical, deal with that first — but only if you can reach the consumer unit without standing in water and without touching anything wet. If you cannot, leave it, keep everyone out of that area, and use a torch rather than a light switch. The detail is in what to do if a pipe bursts.
2. Close the internal stopcock. Clockwise, gently, until it stops. Usually under the kitchen sink; otherwise a downstairs cloakroom, utility, cellar, garage or under the stairs. In a flat it is often inside an airing cupboard or a service riser on the landing. The flow can take a minute or two to die away.
3. Open every cold tap and flush every toilet. This is the step most people skip and it matters more than it sounds. The pipework is still full when you close the stopcock. Opening the taps sends what is left in it down the drain instead of out through the failure.
4. Turn the boiler off at the programmer, and at its fused spur if the spur is dry.
5. Deal with what stores water separately — the heating circuit, a hot water cylinder, a loft cistern. See the next section, because this is where an escape of water carries on after the mains are off.
6. Photograph it wet, before you clean anything. Wide shots of the room, close shots of the source, a short video of water actually coming in. Insurers work from evidence, and the evidence dries.

If the stopcock will not turn, do not put a bar on it. A snapped spindle turns a leak you can stop into one you cannot. WaterSafe covers locating and using a stop tap, and what to do when the internal one is broken.

What the stopcock does not switch off

Closing the stopcock stops water entering the building. It does not empty what is already stored inside it, and on a lot of London properties that is a substantial volume sitting above the leak with gravity behind it.

What it is	Does the stopcock stop it?	What actually stops it
Cold mains and any combi boiler	Yes, once the taps have run through	Stopcock, then open the taps
Sealed heating circuit and radiators	No. It holds its own water and the pump can still move it	Heating off, then drain the circuit, or close both valves on the offending radiator
Hot water cylinder	No. It stays full	Drain it through the lowest hot tap, or its drain cock
Loft cold water cistern, on older systems	It will not refill, but it will empty itself through the leak	Close the gate valve on its outlet, or drain it through the bath cold tap
Expansion or feed cistern for a vented heating system	No	Close its service valve, or tie the float arm up

This is the whole reason a leak sometimes carries on for an hour after someone was sure they had turned the water off. They had. The building was still full.

The heating circuit

A sealed system is a closed loop. Once filled, it is independent of the mains, so a pinhole on a heating pipe keeps running with the stopcock shut. Switch the heating off so the pump stops pushing, then either drain the circuit properly at a drain-off cock on the lowest point, or, if you have identified a single radiator or towel rail as the source, close the wheel valve one end and the lockshield the other and you have isolated that one appliance without draining the house. Our step-by-step is in how to drain down your system.

A word of caution on draining down in winter: an empty system is a cold house. If it is freezing outside and the property will be left, that trade-off is worth thinking about, because frozen pipes are the next problem.

The cylinder

A hot water cylinder holds a couple of hundred litres in most houses. Unvented cylinders are fed from the mains, so the stopcock stops the refill, but the stored water is still under pressure and will keep going out of a failed joint until it equalises. Vented cylinders are fed by gravity from a cistern in the loft, which means the stopcock does almost nothing for them in the short term.

Either way, the fastest way to empty a cylinder is to run the lowest hot tap in the building — usually a ground floor kitchen or cloakroom tap — with the immersion and the boiler off. Never leave an immersion heater switched on with a cylinder that is emptying.

Electrics, properly

Water tracking along a ceiling void reaches light fittings before it reaches the floor. If it is coming through a downlight, out of a ceiling rose, or anywhere near a socket or the consumer unit, treat the circuit as live and dangerous. Do not switch things on to test them. Anything that got wet — fixed wiring, a boiler, a shower unit — needs checking by a registered electrician before it is used again. If water is coming through a ceiling right now, the first ten minutes matter more than the diagnosis.

Why the phrase is "escape of water"

You searched for it because someone used it — a call handler, a policy document, a loss adjuster. It is the insurance industry's heading, not a plumbing term. Most home wordings define it as water escaping from a fixed pipe, a fixed tank, a fixed central heating system or a domestic appliance inside the building.

That definition is doing quiet work. Water on your floor from a bath left running, from failed shower sealant, or from a blocked below-ground drain is usually dealt with somewhere else in the policy, or excluded outright. So when the adjuster asks what happened, the answer they need is not how wet the carpet is. It is where the water came from. We set out the full definition, the common exclusions and how the section interacts with trace and access in escape of water claims explained.

Suddenness, and the thing that decides most claims

Escape of water sections are written around a one-off event. The most common reason a claim gets argued is not the source at all — it is timing. Insurers commonly exclude damage that happened gradually, and a pinhole that has been weeping under a floor for eight months produces exactly the sort of long-term damage that clause was written for.

The Financial Ombudsman Service publishes how it approaches these disputes, and two parts of it are worth knowing before you speak to anyone. First, if it is not satisfied the insurer has shown the damage happened gradually, it is likely to tell the insurer to accept the claim — the burden of showing gradual damage sits with them, not with you. Second, even where damage did happen gradually, the Ombudsman may still tell an insurer to pay if the damage was caused by an insured event such as escape of water and you could not reasonably have been aware of it — its own example is damage concealed behind a kitchen unit or a bath panel. Wear and tear is treated differently, because everything wears out eventually.

What follows from that, practically: the date you first noticed anything is a fact worth being precise about, and a dated technical report on what failed and why is worth considerably more than a conversation. None of this means an insurer will pay — that is their decision on their wording — but it changes what they are deciding on. The detail sits in the gradual damage exclusion.

Two things not to do while it is still running

• Do not strip out more than you have to. Making the property safe is always reasonable. Pulling a ceiling down or ripping up flooring before anyone has seen it removes the evidence of what happened and can complicate the claim. Strip-out is often part of the claim anyway.
• Do not keep topping the boiler up to keep the heating on. Every top-up puts fresh mains water through the failure and into the building. If the pressure will not hold, the system is the source.

When it will not stop

If you have closed the stopcock, drained the mains, isolated the heating and the cylinder, and water is still arriving, then either the source is not yours — a flat above, a communal riser — or it is a below-ground or rainwater problem rather than an escape of water at all. Both are worth establishing before anyone opens a floor, because neither is fixed by a plumber working in your kitchen.

Where the source is yours but invisible, that is a trace before it is a repair. We isolate, pressure-test to confirm the loss is real and size it, then trace the run with thermal imaging and, on a circuit that can be drained, tracer gas — so a floor is opened in one place rather than searched. Our rate is £150 per hour, agreed before we attend, with no call-out fee, and if we are looking for a hidden leak and do not find it you do not pay for the time we spent looking. The visit includes a written report prepared to support a trace and access claim. See emergency leak repair for what that covers.