Emergency Plumber in Burnsville and the South Metro: Open 24/7

Licensed and insured plumbers

Call and a licensed plumber heads your way, any hour. Close your main valve first.

Main water shutoff valve

Most Minnesota basements: street-facing wall, within a few feet of the meter.

Lever handle

Open

handle along the pipe

Closed

handle across the pipe

To close the valve, turn the lever a quarter turn, until the handle sits across the pipe.

Round handle

Open

Closed

A round-handled gate valve takes several full turns.

Charli’s Emergency Plumbing is a 24 hour emergency plumbing service in Burnsville, Minnesota, covering Dakota County and the Twin Cities South Metro. Call 952-521-0880 any hour, day or night, and a licensed plumber will head your way as quickly as possible.

Open 24 hours, every day of the year
Based in the South Metro

Plumbing emergency right now? Do this first

Stop the water first. Nearly every emergency starts with the same short sequence.

Close the fixture valve if there is one.
Under a sink or behind a toilet, look for a small oval or lever handle on the supply line. Turn an oval handle clockwise, or a lever until it sits across the pipe.
If there is no fixture valve, or you cannot reach it, close the main.
In most Minnesota basements it sits on the street-facing wall, within a few feet of the water meter. Turn a lever handle until it sits across the pipe, or a round handle clockwise until it stops.
Turn off the water heater if the water is coming from it.
On a gas unit, turn the control to OFF. On an electric unit, switch off its breaker.
Cut power to a flooded area at the breaker, but only if you can reach the panel without standing in water.
If you cannot reach it safely, leave it alone and say so when you call.
Move what you can off the floor.
Then photograph the damage from a few angles and keep any receipts.
Do not run water into a drain that is already backing up.
Every flush and every load of laundry adds to what is coming back.

Older gate valves, the kind with a round handle that turns several times, seize up when nobody has moved them in fifteen years. If yours will not close, or the packing nut starts weeping as you turn it, stop. A main you cannot close is its own emergency.

When you call, tell us where the water is coming from, whether the main is closed or you could not get it closed, and whether anything electrical is in the water.

Then call 952-521-0880.

Call Now: 952-521-0880

Call now, or can it wait until morning?

Some plumbing failures need someone tonight. Some can wait for daylight.

Call now:

A drain that has gone slow at every fixture on the lowest level of the house is not a slow drain at all, it is the sewer service line or the main, and running more water into it makes the night worse.
A pipe has burst and water is running.
Sewage is backing up out of a drain.
No water at all, anywhere in the house.
A water heater leaking from the body of the tank rather than from a fitting.
A sump pit filling with the pump silent beside it.
Flooding from any fixture that you cannot stop.

Can wait until morning:

One slow drain, with the others running fine.
A dripping faucet.
A running toilet you can shut off at its own valve.
A water heater that is noisy but not leaking.

If you are not sure, call 952-521-0880. If it can safely wait until morning, we will say so.

See the call-now-or-wait guide

Emergency plumbing services

The line covers eight kinds of failure, and each one has its own page with the specifics.

Emergency plumbing is all this line does, with no membership club or maintenance plan waiting at the end of the call.

See all services

Serving the South Metro

Nine South Metro cities have their own page, and each one carries that city’s own published emergency procedure.

Charli’s Emergency Plumbing covers all of Dakota County and Scott County, plus Bloomington, Richfield, Edina, and Eden Prairie. If your address is somewhere else in that area, ask on the call.

View all areas

Open 24 hours a day, every day of the year. Call 952-521-0880.

Call Now: 952-521-0880

Your side of the line, and the city’s

Yours. From the house to where your city draws the line.

The city’s. The main, out in the street.

The South Metro water emergency directory

A water main break out in the street is the city’s. A backed-up sanitary sewer main is the city’s. The run under your own front yard is usually yours, from the house up to where your city draws the line, though the exact boundary is set by your own city rather than by a general rule. Which side of that line your problem sits on decides whether a plumber can fix it at all.

Ten South Metro cities publish their own emergency procedures, usually several clicks deep in a utilities section. The directory puts the procedures in one place, quoting the city, with a link back to its page.

If the problem is on the city’s side, we will say so and you get the city’s number instead.

If it is on your side of the line, call 952-521-0880.

See the full directory

Plumbing in South Metro homes

Two things decide what breaks in a South Metro house: how old it is, and how cold the ground gets.

Age first. A house that has been standing for thirty or forty years is usually on its original shutoff valves and supply lines, though usually not its original water heater. Those parts do not fail on a schedule, but they do fail, and they tend to fail together.

Then the cold. The pipes most exposed to it run through garages, rim joists, and other uninsulated spaces, and a frozen pipe often splits at a point where no ice formed. The Minnesota winter plumbing guide has the Twin Cities frost figures from the Minnesota DNR and what to do when a pipe freezes.

Burnsville homes, median year builtMedian year structure built: 1982. US Census table B25035, ACS 2024 5-year.

Common questions

Where is my main shutoff valve?

In most Minnesota basements, on the street-facing wall within a few feet of the water meter. Finished basements often hide it behind an access panel on that same wall. Slab homes and townhomes usually put it near the water heater or in a utility closet.

Find yours now rather than at 2am, and turn it once while you are there.

Are you really open at 2am?

Yes, the Charli’s Emergency Plumbing line is open 24 hours a day, every day of the year, holidays included.

See all FAQs

The line is open

Burst pipes, sewer backups, dead water heaters, failed sump pumps, and anything else that cannot wait until Monday.

Call 952-521-0880. The line is open.

Call Now: 952-521-0880