Straight answers to real questions

Shut the water off. Town water: the main valve where the line enters the building. Well: the valve after the pressure tank, plus the pump breaker so it can’t refill. Then cut power at the panel to any circuit near standing water, open a low faucet to drain the pressure out, and photograph everything before cleanup. Full detail in the emergency triage tool.

Typically a diagnostic or call-out charge plus $120–$250/hour, with after-hours at 1.5–2× standard. Most single burst-pipe repairs land $400–$1,200; repairs needing walls opened cost more. Full ranges on the cost page.

Actively running water, sewage backing up onto a finished floor, a leaking water heater tank, or no water in winter — those are now. No hot water in a house that’s otherwise fine, a contained drip you’ve shut off at the fixture, or a slow drain — those are tomorrow, at normal rates. We’ll tell you honestly which one you have rather than billing you for the difference.

Yes, with your permission. If a caretaker, neighbor, or alarm reports water and you’re four hours away, tell us where the shut-off is and who has a key, and we can stop it, assess it, and send you photos the same day without you driving up.

Be finished by the end of October. First hard freeze here can arrive in early November. Waterfront and private-road properties — the Tuftonboro drives off 109, the long Moultonborough approaches, the Newfound shore roads — should go earlier, because access gets hard and the whole region needs the same four weeks.

$175–$450 depending on fixture count, well versus town water, and extras — softener, filters, outdoor shower, boathouse, irrigation. Spring startup is similar. Most owners book both at once.

You can, and it’s often the better choice for a house you visit. But it’s only as reliable as your power and your furnace, and most policies require a minimum interior temperature — commonly 55°F — or a shut-off supply in a vacant home. If you do it, add a low-temperature alarm. Every burst-pipe call we take from a heated-but-empty house started as a heat failure nobody knew about.

Water softeners, whole-house filter housings, ice maker lines, dishwasher and washer pump housings, outdoor showers, and dock hose bibs. They all hold water, they all crack, and none of them drain when you open the faucets. The planner builds a list for your specific building.

For now — but it froze for a reason and the reason hasn’t changed. It’ll freeze again next cold snap and eventually split. Find out why that run is cold and fix it while it’s an appointment instead of an emergency.

8–12 years for a standard tank. Hard or acidic well water — common here — shortens it. Rust in the hot water or moisture around the base of a unit past ten years means you’re on borrowed time, and replacing on your schedule costs the same as replacing at 6am on a Sunday minus the flooded floor.

In a busy year-round house with gas or propane, often yes. The catch is our cold inlet water — low 40s for much of the year — which means roughly an 80-degree rise and roughly half the output the headline rating suggests. Tankless has to be sized bigger here. In a small house or a seasonal camp, a tank is the better value. Full explanation in tank vs tankless.

If only the hot is discolored, usually the tank or a spent anode rod — and a tank rusting internally is on its way out. If the cold is discolored too, the problem is upstream: the well, the pressure tank, or in older village houses, galvanized supply pipe corroding from the inside. Different problem, very different cost.

Short-cycling — and it almost always means a waterlogged pressure tank. Stop using water and get it checked. A pressure tank is a few hundred dollars; running a short-cycling system destroys a pump that costs well over a thousand to replace. More in the well water guide.

When several fixtures back up together, the problem is downstream of all of them — the main line, or on most properties here, the septic tank. Before paying for repeated drain clearings, find out when the tank was last pumped. A full tank produces exactly these symptoms and augering doesn’t fix it.

Grease, almost always. It goes down warm, cools on the walls of the horizontal run, and builds a layer that catches everything after it. If it returns within weeks of a clearing, the line likely has too little fall or a partial collapse and needs diagnosing rather than another cabling.

We’d rather you didn’t, especially in older houses. They can damage aging cast iron and some plastics, they make the job hazardous for whoever opens the line, and on a fully blocked drain they mostly just sit in the standing water. Mechanical clearing is safer and it works.

Look in the basement. A tall blue or grey pressure tank with a gauge and a switch means a well. A water meter with valves either side means municipal. We mapped all twenty towns on the water and sewer page.

For most installations and major replacements — including a water heater — usually yes, and your licensed plumber pulls it, not you. Repairs in place, drain clearing, and simple like-for-like fixture swaps generally don’t. Your town is the authority. More on licenses and permits.

Yes, and we’d rather. A running toilet is usually a $15 part and ten minutes. A tripped breaker on a well pump costs nothing. Telling you that on the phone costs us one visit and earns the one that actually matters.

You get the number before work starts. If we open something up and find a different job than the one we quoted, we stop and have a conversation rather than continuing and presenting a surprise at the end. A price that changes without that conversation isn’t a pricing problem, it’s a trust problem.

Yes, on Winnipesaukee and Squam, and it gets scheduled rather than improvised — everything goes over by boat and the window closes when ice starts forming in the coves. Island work gets booked first, and we’d rather tell you honestly in November that we can’t get there than leave you guessing.