A plumbing emergency can be both expensive and inconvenient, and will often require you and your family to shut off all water to the home until a plumber shows up to perform hundreds’ (sometime thousands’) of dollars worth of repairs to restore service to the home. The good news is that in many cases, these emergencies are predictable, if not preventable.

You never really know when you’ll need a plumber, and most people only call for service when they have an emergency. But when disaster strikes and you open the Yellow Pages or do a Google search, how do you make an informed decision?

Besides being aggravating, a toilet that won’t stop running can cost a lot of money over time. Even a small leak can waste as much as a thousand gallons of water a year, which is a lot of money to “flush down the toilet”.