What can I check myself, before I ring anyone?
Most jobs that turn into two visits turn into two visits for one reason: nobody knew what the problem was until someone stood in front of it. That happens when the only information available is a description over the phone, and it costs both sides a morning.
A few checks change that. Some of them solve the problem outright. The rest turn a vague description into something specific enough to arrive prepared for.
If there is water where it should not be
This comes first, before anything else on this list. Stop the water.
Most flats and houses round here have one under the sink or in a cupboard off the hallway, and where the supply enters the building there is usually another. Turn it, then open a cold tap and watch it. The tap should die, not weaken.
Then look at what is wet and work out what is above it. Water travels along a pipe before it finds a way out, so the wet patch is frequently not where the failure is. On a larger property it can be two rooms away from the actual joint.
If the water is coming through a ceiling, put a bucket under it and put a hole in the ceiling below the bulge with a screwdriver. Water held above a ceiling spreads sideways and takes the plaster with it. A small hole now is cheaper than a ceiling later.
If it is a drain
Open the trap. Under a sink it is the U-shaped part, and it is designed to be taken apart. Bowl underneath, unscrew by hand, empty it, put it back with the washer seated correctly.
For a shower, lift the grate and clear the gully. Most shower blockages are hair and soap sitting right there, not in the pipe behind it.
Then test properly. Fill the basin and let it go. Fast and clear with a gurgle at the end means the run behind the trap is fine. Slow, or water that sits and then drops, means the blockage is further along and no plunger will reach it.
Finally, check a fixture in another room. If that is slow as well, the problem is not in your sink, and in an apartment block that is the difference between your bill and the community’s. That last check matters most in the older blocks around Calahonda, Riviera del Sol and Torrenueva, where a stack serves several flats and nobody has ever been sure where one property ends and the next begins.
If it is a toilet
Running or blocked are two completely different jobs and they get mixed up constantly.
If it runs when nobody has flushed it, that is a fill valve or a flush seal, and it is a part. If it backs up when you flush, that is a blockage. If it flushes weakly but does not back up, that is usually scale in the rim jets or a tired flush mechanism.
Lift the cistern lid and look. Water sitting high and trickling down the overflow is the fill valve. Water dropping slowly on its own is the flush seal. A photograph of the inside of the cistern answers it before anyone sets off.
If the hot water has gone
Before anything else, check the switches people skip. Has the trip gone at the consumer unit? Is the unit on at the isolator, which is sometimes a separate switch on the wall and sometimes a fused spur? Has someone turned it off for a reason and not turned it back on?
If those are all fine, the two common faults are the element and the thermostat, and telling them apart is a matter of whether you have no hot water at all or warm water that never properly gets hot. We go through that properly in why water heaters fail early here, including when a repair is no longer worth paying for.
If a tap is dripping or a shower is weak
A dripping tap is a washer or a cartridge, and not an emergency.
A shower that has gone weak is worth working through in order: unscrew the head and look at the holes, listen to the pump if there is one, and check whether the cold taps elsewhere in the property are also weak. If they are, putting a new head on it will fix nothing, because the supply is the problem rather than the shower.
What to have ready when you call
Four things, and they turn a callout into a decision.
What the problem is, in one sentence. When it started, and whether anything changed at the same time. What you have already tried, including anything you turned off. And for a toilet, a photo looking down into the cistern with the lid off, because the valve inside it is the one thing a description reliably gets wrong.
The checks above are written for the flats and villas around Calahonda and the coast road, where the water is hard and the building stock runs from 1960s to last year. If you are further along the ring the answers are the same; only the pipes change.
When not to diagnose it yourself
Stop and call someone if water is running where you cannot isolate it, if anything smells of gas, if the water is coming from an electrical fitting or near one, or if you are in a flat and the leak is clearly coming from the building rather than your own fittings.
Also stop if the job needs a sealed appliance opened, or if you are dealing with anything that burns fuel.
What to do with what you found
None of this replaces a plumber. What it does is tell you which of the things on our services page you are dealing with, and whether you are looking at emergency plumbing or something that will keep until Monday. In a block with a shared stack, read the comunidad post before you ring anyone.
None of these checks fix a hard problem. They separate the jobs that need a plumber from the ones that need a washer, and give the rest a description specific enough to be solved in one visit.
If you get that far and are still not sure, send what you found rather than a paragraph about a noise. Which fixtures are affected, which are not, and one photograph. That is a better starting point than any amount of description.
