Water pooling under the heater.
Water under a tank is not automatically a dead tank. There are four usual causes and they have very different price tags.
Things worth knowing.
Guides written to be useful before you call anyone, including in the cases where the answer is that you do not need us.
Written to be useful before you call
Most plumbing guidance online exists to make you call someone. These are written the other way around: each one tells you what the symptom usually means, what you can check yourself in ten safe minutes, and the point at which it stops being a homeowner job. Several of them end with "and if that is what you are seeing, you do not need a plumber."
Where a guide does recommend calling someone, it says why — an active leak inside a wall, a gas appliance, or anything where being wrong floods a floor. A call with a good description beats an early one.
Find the shutoff before you need it.
Every emergency plumbing call gets shorter and cheaper if you already know where this is. It takes ten minutes on a dry afternoon.
Why it always happens in October.
Backup calls are seasonal, and the pattern is consistent enough that you can plan around it.
The gray pipe worth identifying.
If your home went up between roughly 1978 and 1996, this is worth half an hour of certainty.
When the pressure goes.
The first question is whether it is one fixture or all of them, because that single answer splits the diagnosis in half.
Tell us what the house is doing