Help! @PigletJohn

[ILikeyourHairyHands]

@PigletJohn or any other plumber, we have two boilers, one in the kitchen that provides hot water (combi) and another in the attic for heating (combi also). The pipes are hissing as though there's hot water going through but nothing is coming out of the hot taps. The pilot light's on and the boiler's fired-up.

Heating is on fine, so presumably it's the kitchen boiler gone amiss. Shouldn't be frozen pipes as we're in a much warmer thawing situation today.

Am worried it's all going to blow up. DH has turned the kitchen boiler off, all hot taps are off, but they're still making the 'hot water running sound.

Any advice?

how sure are you that the water supply to the boiler is turned on and working? There may be a "T" shaped tap head under it, possibly blue.

Or there might be a leak in a hot pipe or a hot tap somewhere allowing all the hot water to escape. Turn off your main stopcock and see if the noise changes. If a pipe (under the floor perhaps) had frozen, it might have burst and be allowing water to escape when it thawed out.

Thanks! Will check all.

DH is now checking the shed where there is another supply.

Yep. It's the shed.

What's best to do? Plumber tomorrow?

Should we turn the stopcock off, we're not metered.

DH could apparently repair It, he used to own a brewery.

Stop Press. We don't know where our stopcock is.

Any ideas?

Neighbours stop cocks might be in a similar place to yours.

We ended up having someone from Northumbrian water around to find ours, after a capped off pipe blew. Some idiot had concreted over the access.

But yes, if you can find it, turn it off as that leak might be soaking into your floor and walls.

The shed's a way from the house. It is spurting though....

Walk n a straight line from your house to your shed then from your she'd to the road. If there's diagonals involved, you might have to walk along the other edges of the triangles made. You may find signs of where the stopcock is, along the way.

the stopcock for the house is most likely next to where the front gate used to be, when the house was built.

They may be one under the pavement, just the other side of the gate, and/or in your garden, next to where the path used to be, within a yard of the boundary.

There might also be one under the hall floor, just inside and to one side of where the front door used to be, or under the stairs. Quite often the waterpipe runs in a straight line from the front gate to the front door, under the hall floor, into the kitchen, and come up under the sink. In "universal plan" houses that's usually the most sensible, easy and economical place to run it.

Other houses down your road are very likely to have it in the same place so you could prowl around with a torch or ask other residents, especially if they have lived their for a while and will have encountered plumbing repairs.

If your shed was supplied from the house, there was almost certainly a stopcock fitted in the house. It might be under where the kitchen sink used to be when the house was built.

That's the thing, pj. Our old house had no water at the front and it came in from a particular point at the back. It's not something that can be generalised.

Got a sewage map if this house but stop cock is definitely not at the front.