Plumbers in Nevada, Texas

What keeps working, and what quietly does not

Worth knowing before you need it, because the list is not what most people assume.

Cold water carries on. The utility keeps the mains pressurised, so taps and toilets work normally. Fill a few containers early anyway, because a long regional outage can eventually affect the utility's own pumping.

A gas water heater with electronic controls will not fire. Older standing pilot units carry on and give you a tank of hot water. Anything with an electronic ignition or a powered vent stops, and there is no way round that at home.

Electric heaters simply stop. You have whatever is in the tank, and it cools over a day or so. Using it sparingly early in an outage is worth doing deliberately.

Anything with a pump in your house stops. A recirculation pump, a filtered drinking system, a booster on a long run, a sewage ejector in a lower level. That last one matters.

Water heaters do not need switching off. Leave them be. A gas unit on a standing pilot is doing something useful, and an electric one restarts safely as long as it stayed full.

Go easy on the drains

This is the part nobody is told, and it is the one that produces sewage in a house.

Municipal sewers use lift stations, and lift stations need power. Most have backup, and backup runs out or fails. In a long outage the system can surcharge, and the first place it shows is the lowest fixture in the lowest house on the street.

Ease off the volume while the power is out. Laundry and dishwashers can wait. Flushing is fine, but a household sending its usual load into a system running on generators is not helping anybody.

If your house has an ejector or grinder pump, it is out of service. Any fixture below the main line cannot drain. Using it means a basin filling in the room where you least want one.

Watch the lowest drain in the house. If water starts backing up there during a long outage, stop using water entirely and call the utility as well as us.

Coming back on

Restoration is quick and there are three things worth doing in the first hour.

Check the water heater is full before it heats. If the supply was interrupted as well as the power, prove flow at a hot tap first. An electric element fired in a part empty tank is destroyed in seconds.

Run the cold taps through. Especially if the utility had pressure problems. A few minutes clears anything that was sitting in the line.

Anything with a clock in it needs a look. Treatment equipment and sprinkler timers often wake up on factory settings or resume a cycle they never finished. A softener caught partway through a backwash is the one that puts brine into the house.

Look under the sinks and at the heater. A freeze related outage is the one that leaves splits behind, and they show up when pressure and temperature return to normal.

How a call plays out

Tell us whether the power is back yet and whether anything is backing up. Those two answers decide whether this is a conversation or a visit.

Nevada, Josephine, Farmersville and the eastern side of Collin County are on our round. We answer the phone through an outage, we will talk you through what to stop using rather than selling you a call-out, and we deal with the splits and failures that show up once everything comes back.