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How to Repair a Leaky Pipe
Water is coming out of a pipe and you want it to stop. The first five minutes matter more than the repair does, and the repair itself depends almost entirely on one thing most guides never ask: what the pipe is made of. Get that wrong and the fix will not hold.
The Short Answer
Turn the water off first, then find out what the pipe is. Copper can be soldered, cut and remade, or joined with compression or push-fit. Plastic takes push-fit or compression. Lead takes none of them and needs a plumber, because you cannot solder a modern fitting onto lead and a bodged lead joint fails. A temporary clamp or repair tape buys you hours, not weeks. If the pipe is gas rather than water, stop and ring 0800 111 999.
The First Five Minutes
Before any decision about repairing anything, reduce the damage. Water does far more harm than the repair costs, and in a flat most of that harm lands on somebody else.
Turn the supply off. The internal stopcock is usually under the kitchen sink, sometimes in a hall cupboard or under the bath. Turn it clockwise. If it is seized, or you cannot find it, the external stop valve serves the property from the street or the close, and it needs a key rather than a hand.
Then open the taps, cold ones first. That drains the pipework down and takes the pressure off the leak, and it makes a real difference to how much arrives on the floor while you work out what to do next.
Get buckets under it and get towels down, and if the water is anywhere near a light fitting, a socket or a consumer unit, turn the electricity off at the consumer unit before you deal with the water. Water tracking along a joist and into a ceiling rose is a genuine electrical risk and it is not obvious from the room you are standing in.
And if there is any chance the pipe is a gas pipe rather than a water pipe, none of the above applies. Leave it, get everyone out, and ring the National Gas Emergency Service on 0800 111 999 from outside. They hold the statutory duty to make a gas escape safe, they attend free, and that call comes before any plumber including us.
Work Out What the Pipe Is Made Of
This is the step that decides everything after it, and it takes ten seconds. Wipe the pipe clean and look at it in good light.
Copper is the commonest: a warm orange-brown when clean, going dull brown or green with age, and it rings when you tap it. It is rigid, and joints are either soldered, which look like neat silver bands, or compression, which are brass nuts either side of a body.
Plastic is white, grey or occasionally blue, slightly flexible, and much lighter. Joints are push-fit collars or compression. Anything laid or altered since roughly the 1990s may well be plastic even in an old building.
Lead is the one to identify carefully. It is dull grey, noticeably soft, thicker-walled than copper, and often has swollen bulbous joints where sections were wiped together by hand. It scratches to a bright silver with a coin. Older Glasgow property still has lead in places, usually short lengths on the incoming supply or on an original run nobody has replaced.
The rule that follows is short: copper and plastic have DIY repairs. Lead does not. You cannot solder a modern fitting to lead, compression fittings on lead need a specific insert and technique, and a lead pipe that has been disturbed and badly remade will leak again somewhere else. If it is lead, turn the water off and call somebody.
Temporary Fixes, and How Long They Actually Last
Useful and worth knowing, provided you are honest about what they are. None of these is a repair. They are a way of getting water back on until a proper fix happens.
- A proprietary pipe repair clamp. A hinged metal sleeve with a rubber liner that bolts around the pipe. The most reliable of the temporary options and it will hold a pinhole for days rather than hours. Sizes are pipe-specific, so measure before buying.
- Self-amalgamating silicone tape. Stretches and bonds to itself rather than to the pipe, wrapped tightly with a good overlap either side of the leak. Effective on a weeping joint or a pinhole. Needs a dry pipe to start on, which is the difficulty.
- Epoxy putty. Kneaded and pressed over a cleaned, dried leak. It works on a small hole on a rigid pipe, and it is poor on a joint and poor on anything flexing.
- A jubilee clip and a piece of rubber. The improvised version of a repair clamp. Fine for a few hours, and worth knowing about when the shops are shut.
Cut It Out and Rejoin It
On copper there are three real options and the right one depends on where the pipe is and what tools you have.
Cut out and replace with a compression fitting. A pipe slice or hacksaw, clean the ends square, deburr, and fit a straight compression coupler with a short piece of new pipe. No heat, no flame, and it is the most forgiving repair for someone doing it once. Its weakness is that it is bulky and needs access all round.
Push-fit. Even more forgiving, no tools beyond a cutter, and modern push-fit is entirely acceptable on a permanent repair despite the impression that it is a lesser fix. Make sure the pipe end is clean, square and deburred, and that a pipe insert is used where the run is plastic.
Soldering, which gives the neatest and most compact joint and needs the pipe dry and a blowtorch. That is a technique in its own right and it has real fire risk in an old building, so it has its own guide in this cluster.
On plastic, push-fit or compression, always with the correct insert in the pipe end. On lead, none of the above.
Whatever the repair, when the water goes back on, open a tap first to let air out, then bring pressure up gradually and watch the joint for several minutes. Most failures show immediately, and the ones that do not usually show within the hour, so it is worth staying nearby.
Damp With No Obvious Source
Sometimes there is damp and no visible source, and this is a different problem from a pipe you can see dripping. Water travels along joists, along the underside of floorboards and down the outside of pipes, so the wet patch is very often not above the leak.
Before assuming the worst, rule out the cheap explanations. A shower tray or bath seal failing, which shows only after use. An overflow from a cistern. Condensation on cold pipework in an unventilated cupboard, which looks exactly like a slow leak. And a waste pipe rather than a supply pipe, which only leaks while something is draining.
If it is a supply leak, the useful test is to turn everything off inside the property and watch the water meter if you have one, or listen at the stopcock with the taps shut. Movement with everything off means water is leaving somewhere.
Beyond that, finding it without pulling up floors is what leak detection equipment is for: acoustic tracing, thermal imaging and pressure testing sections of the system to narrow it to a run. That is the point at which guessing gets expensive, and it is worth stopping before lifting anything.
Three Eras of Pipework in One Flat
The reason the material question matters so much here is that a typical Glasgow flat contains pipework from several different periods at once, and the joins between them are where trouble starts. An original building may still have lead on the incoming supply, copper from a mid-century upgrade through most of the flat, and plastic from whatever was done during the last kitchen or bathroom refit.
So the answer to what your pipes are made of is often all three, depending which cupboard you are looking in. That matters practically: a repair that is right under the sink may be wrong under the floor six feet away, and the transition points between materials are disproportionately where leaks appear, because a joint between dissimilar materials is a joint somebody had to improvise.
Lead is the one worth knowing about specifically. Its presence in older Scottish property is not unusual, particularly on short lengths of the incoming supply before the internal stopcock, and it is soft enough to be damaged by an enthusiastic wrench. If you find dull grey, soft, thick-walled pipe with swollen joints, stop there. That is not a DIY repair and disturbing it tends to produce a second leak next to the first.
Access is the other local factor. Original floors in tenement flats are usually tongue and groove boards over deep joists, frequently with later flooring laid straight over the top, so getting to a pipe run can mean lifting two floors rather than one. That is a strong argument for tracing a leak properly before anything comes up, rather than opening the floor where the damp appears and hoping.
When to Call Someone Out
Call straight away for anything involving lead pipe, for a leak you cannot isolate because the stopcock is seized or missing, or for water anywhere near electrics. Call rather than guessing when there is damp with no visible source, because tracing it with acoustic and thermal equipment costs far less than lifting a floor in the wrong room. Mo, Kyle or Matt cover leak work, and if a temporary clamp is holding and the situation is stable, say so on the phone, since that changes how urgently it needs attending rather than whether it does. If the pipe might be gas, that is not a call to us: get out and ring 0800 111 999 first.
Leak Detection in GlasgowCommon Questions
Turn the supply off at the internal stopcock, usually under the kitchen sink, then open the cold taps to drain the pipework and take the pressure off. Get buckets under it. If water is anywhere near a light fitting or socket, turn the electricity off at the consumer unit before dealing with the water.
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How to Solder Copper Plumbing
Clean the pipe end and the inside of the fitting until both are bright, flux both, assemble, and heat the fitting rather than the solder until the solder is drawn into the joint by capillary action.
How to Stop a Leaking Pipe With Water in It
You have two choices: stop the water reaching the joint, or use a fitting that does not care.
How to Fix a Leaking Pipe Joint
Identify the joint type first.
Can You Use Plastic Pipe With Compression Fittings?
You can, provided you fit a pipe insert, sometimes called a pipe stiffener, into the end of the plastic pipe before making the joint.
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