What To Do If The Hot Water Intake On Your Washing Machine Bursts

Posted on: 7 April 2021

The tube or pipe that leads from your hot water tank to the washing machine usually does its job without any help from a homeowner. But like anything that's exposed to extremely hot water for a long period of time, a breakdown is bound to occur at some point. Hot water tanks can eventually corrode and break down from the heat, and when this happens, you'll likely have a lot of hot water flying everywhere and a big, wet mess on your hands. Here's what you should do in this instance.

Turn Off the Water

First things first: hot water is extremely dangerous and can badly burn you. So for now, avoid entering the room with your washing machine. Just close the door if you have one and turn around — you don't want to get hurt.

Head outside and either shut off the water main or the valve that controls the hot water heater. Either will ensure that water stops flowing through the busted line and flooding your home. It may be more convenient to shut off the water heater so that you can keep using water in the rest of your house.

Turn Off Your Smoke Detector

This is an optional step, but if you have a smoke detector in the same room as the washing machine, you might want to turn it off temporarily. Extremely hot water can create enough steam to set off a smoke detector. While it's not going to make your plumbing situation any worse, it could certainly worsen the headache you're likely to already have just from your plumbing problem. Just don't forget to turn it back on as soon as your plumbing is fixed.

Contact a Plumber

Lastly, contact an emergency plumber in your area. They're going to be able to fix this problem for you a lot faster than you could do it yourself.

Your plumber will come in and pull out the washing machine so that they can look at the water hookups behind it. From there, they'll determine if something went wrong with the pipe or tube itself or if there's an issue with the connection to the spigot or the washing machine. If it's just a matter of the tube bursting, they can quickly replace that for you and you'll be back in working order in no time.

If there's a bigger problem with the washing machine or the wall spigot, they can help you with that too, though it may require replacing some parts that could take some extra time. In this instance, they'll shut off the hot water connection to your washing machine so that you can continue using it with cold water while they acquire the parts to fix it.

Contact a local plumbing service to learn more.

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