What to do in the first ten minutes of a burst pipe

The single most valuable thing you can do before an engineer arrives is stop the water. Find your internal stopcock — usually under the kitchen sink, in an airing cupboard or near the front door — and turn it clockwise until it stops.

Next, open every cold tap in the house. This drains the remaining water in the pipework away from the split rather than into your ceiling. Leave the taps running until the flow stops completely.

If water is anywhere near lighting, sockets or a consumer unit, switch the electricity off at the mains before you start mopping. Water and electricity together is the part of a burst pipe that actually hurts people.

Then photograph everything. Insurers want evidence of the damage before it is cleaned up, and a handful of phone photos routinely saves homeowners hundreds of pounds on a claim.

Finally, call an engineer and describe where the water is coming from and whether you have managed to isolate it. That single detail tells us what to load into the van and how urgently we need to be with you.