Plumbers near you

It is worth being blunt about this, because a great deal of advertising implies otherwise: there is no statutory licence to work as a plumber in the UK. A plumber may be highly qualified and belong to a professional body, or may have neither, and no register stands between the two. The legal requirements attach to the work, not to the job title.

Three legal hooks matter to a household. Gas work is reserved by law to Gas Safe registered engineers, so a plumber who is not registered cannot lawfully work on your boiler. Water fittings work is governed by the Water Supply (Water Fittings) Regulations 1999, which set requirements for fittings and for preventing contamination and backflow, and require notice to the water company before certain installations. And the building regulations cover parts of the same territory: in England, Approved Document G deals with cold water supply, water efficiency, hot water supply and systems, sanitary conveniences and washing facilities, bathrooms, and kitchens.

Voluntary schemes fill the reputation gap. WaterSafe describes itself as a free national directory and accreditation body for qualified plumbers, drawing on approved contractor schemes run by bodies including WIAPS, APHC, CIPHE and SNIPEF, and an approved contractor can carry out some notifiable work without giving the water company prior notice. In England, installers registered with a competent person scheme can also self-certify certain building work instead of going through building control. None of that is a licence, but it is evidence, and evidence is what you are looking for.

The most useful thing you can do before a plumbing emergency is find your internal stopcock, turn it to confirm it actually moves, and make sure everyone in the household knows where it is. The stopcock that has not been turned in twenty years is precisely the one that will not turn on a Sunday night.

If a pipe bursts, close the stopcock, open the cold taps to drain the system down, and switch off the heating and any immersion heater so nothing is heating an emptying cylinder. Keep water away from electrics: if water is anywhere near the consumer unit, sockets or light fittings, treat it as an electrical hazard as well and get an electrician involved. Take photographs before anyone starts stripping out, because your insurer will want to see them.

Cold snaps bring their own version of this. Pipes in lofts, garages and unheated outbuildings freeze first, and the damage usually appears when they thaw rather than when they freeze. Lagging exposed pipework, keeping a little heat on through a freeze, and knowing where the stopcock is are the three things that limit how bad it gets.

Hot water temperature is a safety matter rather than a comfort setting. The Health and Safety Executive's guidance for landlords on legionella sets out simple, proportionate controls for domestic systems, including storing water in hot water cylinders at 60°C, flushing through systems before a property is let, removing redundant pipework and cleaning showerheads. It is also clear that health and safety law does not require a landlord to obtain or produce a legionella test certificate, and that most small domestic properties do not need an in-depth assessment. That is worth knowing if somebody tries to sell you one.

Alongside that, a short annual round of checks is enough for most homes: turn the stopcock and any isolating valves so they do not seize, look under sinks and behind the washing machine for damp patches, check whether the overflow or the discharge pipe outside is dripping, and clear the gullies and gutters before winter. Most of the expensive jobs a plumber attends started as something small that nobody looked at.

The Water Supply (Water Fittings) Regulations 1999 require notice to the water undertaker before certain installations, and the list catches more household projects than people expect. The water company cannot unreasonably withhold consent and has ten working days to respond. There is a practical exception: an approved contractor can carry out some of this work without prior notification and certify it instead, which is one concrete reason to use a plumber on an approved contractor scheme.

Plumbers price access as much as the work itself. A visible joint under a sink and an identical joint under a tiled bathroom floor are the same repair and a completely different job.

When a system is being replaced rather than repaired, this is the decision underneath all the others. A combi heats water on demand and frees up the airing cupboard and the loft, which is why it suits smaller homes and flats, but it delivers one flow of hot water at a time, so two showers at once is where it shows its limits.

A cylinder stores hot water, which suits larger households, homes with more than one bathroom, and anyone moving to a heat pump, since heat pumps heat water to a cylinder rather than instantly. The trade-off is the space the cylinder takes and the need to heat a store whether or not it all gets used.

LokalMatch works the same way for a dripping tap as for a bathroom refit: describe the job once, with photos and your postcode, and plumbers covering your area get in touch. The pros pay for the requests they receive. LokalMatch does not do the plumbing, does not set the price, and does not vet, rank or recommend the businesses that reply, so comparing what is actually included in each quotation is down to you.