Eleven o’clock at night in a converted block near Slough High Street: water is dripping through a light fitting, the neighbour upstairs is not answering the door, and the stopcock under your own sink does nothing because the leak is coming from someone else’s pipework. Thousands of Slough households now live in buildings that were designed as offices, and when a pipe lets go in one of them, the water rarely stays in the flat where it started.
TrueFlow is a plumbing and drainage firm based in Bracknell that covers Slough around the clock, 365 days a year, with a 60-minute emergency response target. Our emergency plumbing engineers deal with everything from a leaking riser or a burst pipe to a flat with no water and a toilet that will not stop overflowing. The work is done by fully insured engineers and every emergency repair is guaranteed for 6 months.
Converted offices, workers’ semis and very hard water
Slough has turned more office space into homes than almost anywhere in England. In the years after permitted development rights were loosened, roughly 35 per cent of the town’s new homes were created inside former office blocks, one of the highest proportions of any council area in England. Office buildings were never plumbed for dozens of kitchens and bathrooms. Retrofitted flats often share communal risers with no isolation valve inside the flat itself, so a leak in one unit can only be stopped from a service cupboard or plant room, and it usually announces itself through the ceiling of the flat below.
The older stock has its own habits. The interwar estates built for Trading Estate workers, Manor Park and Cippenham among them, still hide plenty of original steel pipework in imperial sizes, and steel of that age corrodes from the inside until a pinhole opens without warning. Joining modern metric fittings to those old runs takes the right adaptors, a standard part of a properly equipped emergency plumber’s kit.
Then there is the water itself. Thames Water supplies Slough, and it arrives at around 300 mg/l of calcium carbonate, on the border between hard and very hard. That scale seizes stopcocks solid and furs up float valves, so the one valve you need in an emergency is often the one that will not turn.
What happens once you ring
First we get the water stopped. On the phone we will talk you through finding the right isolation point, whether that is your internal stopcock, the outside meter valve or a communal riser. In a managed block we can deal directly with the letting agent, block manager or out-of-hours facilities line, and wait for authorisation before opening up shared services. On site, the engineer pins down the fault and puts an exact figure in front of you; work starts when you say yes, and the repair is guaranteed for 6 months.
The emergency call-out charge begins at £120 including VAT, and that is a genuine from-price. Whatever the job turns out to involve, you get the exact figure before any work begins, at 3am on a bank holiday just as on a Tuesday morning.
Slough call-out questions, answered
Water is pouring through my ceiling at night and the flat above is empty. What do I do first?
Switch off the lighting circuit at your consumer unit if water is anywhere near fittings, and catch what you can. Your own stopcock will not stop a leak from upstairs, so ring the block’s emergency management line if one exists, then call us on 0808 175 7440. We can trace the supply and isolate it at the riser, with authorisation where communal valves are involved.
In a converted office block, is a burst pipe my problem or the freeholder’s?
It depends where the pipe sits. Pipework serving only your flat is normally the leaseholder’s responsibility, while communal risers and stacks usually belong to the freeholder or management company. Your lease has the final word. We can establish which side of that line the failure is on and put it in writing for insurers or the managing agent.
Can you attend a commercial unit on the Trading Estate outside working hours?
Yes. The Slough Trading Estate is Europe’s largest in single private ownership, with around 500 businesses on site, and a burst pipe there rarely waits for opening time. We attend commercial premises 24 hours a day, coordinate with on-site security or facilities staff, and agree the exact price before work starts.
Whether it is your own flat, your tenant’s, or a unit on the estate, call TrueFlow on 0808 175 7440. Lines are answered day and night, every day of the year, and we aim to be with you within 60 minutes. For planned work rather than a crisis, start from our plumber in Slough page.