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No heat, no water, an active leak, or a backed up main. These move to the front of the line, day or night, weekend or holiday.
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If water is coming out right now, shut the main off before you read another word, then call (703) 491-6542. The rest of this page is for the ten minutes after that.
In a house with a basement it is almost always on the wall facing the street, where the line comes up through the foundation, within arm's reach of the meter and usually behind something nobody has moved in years. In the townhouses through Lake Ridge and Dale City it tends to live in the water heater closet. On a slab, look low in the mechanical closet. Either a round handle you turn clockwise until it stops, or a lever you turn a quarter turn.
Outside is a different question. Prince William Water owns the line from the main to the meter and you own everything from the meter to the building. Virginia Residential Code Section P2603.5 puts a water service pipe at least 12 inches deep and not less than 6 inches below the frost line, and the frost line is set by the locality rather than the state. A yard line that freezes was probably never deep enough, which makes it a water service replacement rather than a pipe repair.
Ice forms a plug somewhere in the run. The water between that plug and a closed faucet has nowhere to go, and what lets go is whatever was weakest along that stretch, often a solder joint several feet from anything actually frozen. We have opened ceilings where the frozen length was fine and the failure was a fitting in the next joist bay. Locating comes before cutting.
The code already tells you where to look. P2603.5 says that where the winter design temperature is 32 degrees F or lower, water, soil and waste pipe shall not be run outside a building, in exterior walls, in attics or in crawl spaces unless protected by insulation or heat or both. Northern Virginia sits in that bracket. So the unheated crawlspace, the garage wall and the hose bib are not bad luck when they freeze. They are the places the code assumed somebody would protect.
The Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety studied plumbing supply system failures and ranks them the leading source of residential water losses, with 48% greater total payouts than the second leading source. Inside that study, 65% of claims were a failure of the supply system material and 18% were frozen pipes. 39% happened in January. Freeze claims were the expensive ones, averaging $8,189 against $4,296 for a material failure. Those frozen pipe claims ran from 1998 to 2005, so treat the dollars as dated and the ratio as the point.
You will also see $15,400 quoted everywhere. That is the Insurance Information Institute average paid per claim for water damage and freezing over 2019 to 2023, covering everything in that bucket, from a dishwasher hose to a house that filled up while the owners were away. The same category swung between 19.8% and 28.7% of all homeowner losses across those five years, which tells you there is no typical claim. What is stable is the odds. About one in 60 insured homes files a water damage or freezing claim.
Plumbers will tell you one material handles a freeze better than another. We cannot find a published test that settles it, so we will not pretend otherwise. What is published is how each material ages and what actually makes it fail, which matters more, because a hard freeze finds the system that was already marginal.
| Material | How to recognise it | Published service life | The documented failure mode |
|---|---|---|---|
| Copper | Metal tube, soldered joints. Type K marked green, Type L blue, Type M red. Type M has the thinnest wall. | Roughly 50 to 70 years per InterNACHI, whose own chart carries both figures in different rows and disclaims all of them as guidelines only | Pitting driven by water chemistry, not age. A Virginia Tech master's thesis reports it was proven in 2004 that water alone can eat a pinhole through copper with no defect in the tube and no installation error. |
| CPVC | Cream or tan rigid plastic, solvent welded fittings. | Well in excess of 50 years per the Plastics Pipe Institute, the plastic pipe trade association, conditional on correct specification and installation | Contact with the wrong product. Thread sealants, fire stop materials, glycol antifreeze, solder flux and some wire insulation are all documented as cracking it. |
| PEX | Flexible tube, often red, blue or white, with crimp or expansion fittings. | 40 years per InterNACHI, against a 50 year minimum extrapolated lifetime from an accelerated lab test under ASTM F2023 | Historically the fittings rather than the pipe. High zinc yellow brass can dezincify. UV limits are real but published per manufacturer, and indirect light counts. |
| Galvanized steel | Dull grey threaded steel. Common until the 1950s, so anything still in service is 70 plus years old. | None. The 40 to 50 years the trade quotes appears in no authority we could find, and one peer reviewed paper says galvanizing thickness alone does not ensure longevity | The zinc, roughly 40 to 55 micrometres of it, depletes. Bare steel then corrodes inward, scale narrows the bore, pressure falls off and the water runs rusty. |
| Polybutylene | Usually grey, sometimes white, silver, black or blue. Half inch to 1 inch. Normally stamped PB2110. Made 1978 to mid-1995. | Not applicable. There is no interval to plan around | Oxidants in treated water react with the pipe and the fittings, which scale, flake and turn brittle. Micro-fractures start inside, so it may fail without warning. |
Two corrections, because we would rather lose an argument than repeat a myth. CPVC does not go brittle from chlorine. The only technical source on it, Plastics Pipe Institute TN-62, calls CPVC immune to chlorine degradation even in continuous hot service. What cracks CPVC is what touched it during construction, which is why we care what sealant was on the threads of the last repair. And nobody can tell you how long galvanized pipe lasts, because no authority publishes a figure. The era is the stronger argument anyway.
Polybutylene is the one we would want to know about if it were our house. No inspection clears it, because the deterioration starts inside the pipe wall and cannot be seen without taking the pipe apart. The history is on the record: a federal appellate opinion describes the 1995 Cox settlement requiring Shell and Hoechst to put $950 million toward replacing leaking PB systems, and the acetal fittings sold as Celcon and Delrin were implicated alongside the pipe resin, though manufacturers argued the leaks concentrated at joints. If you find grey PB2110 in a house from that era, the question is when to repipe, not whether.
State Farm reported paying out nearly $30 million on homeowner claims in 2020 for damage caused by washing machine hose failure, with an average claim of $10,200, which State Farm notes varies by state. A failed hose can displace an average of 650 gallons per hour. State Farm recommends replacing supply hoses every three to five years. That is an insurer's recommendation, not a code requirement, and no authority we could find publishes a service life for a braided stainless line at all.
Know what one is. A braided line is a plastic hose inside a steel braid. The braid is abrasion protection, not the part holding pressure, so what fails is the inner tube and the rubber gaskets at the ends. IBHS lists the reasons: normal wear, damage from shoving the appliance around, too much water pressure, heat and cold degrading the rubber, water quality. On pressure, Prince William Water's own design standards call for a pressure reducing device where working pressure at the building exceeds 80 psi.
The pattern runs through every fixture in IBHS's data. 78% of toilet incidents traced to supply lines, flanges, fill valves or an overflow. A burst supply line caused half of all washing machine incidents. 44% of sink incidents and 73% of icemaker losses came back to the supply line. New braided lines are the cheapest plumbing you will ever buy.
We repair split supply lines, locate frozen sections inside walls and under floors, thaw them without cooking the pipe, replace the run where it has earned it, and swap tired hose bibs for frost proof ones. What we will not do is promise you a van in your driveway at 3am. Anyone promising that is guessing about the other four calls that night. What you get is a plumber on the phone walking you to the shutoff, and a start time you can plan around.
The code is on your side in an emergency. USBC Section 108.1 requires the permit application for emergency work to be in by the end of the first working day after the work starts, and lets the building official authorise work before the permit issues. See 13VAC5-63-80. We file it. Once the job stops being a repair and turns into a repipe or a new water service, it is permitted and inspected, and that does not get skipped either. Family owned, 40 plus years, Virginia Class A licence 2705131990.
Shut the water off first, then dial (703) 491-6542.
