It comes up on more jobs than you'd think. A tap fitting gives way, a pipe starts weeping, something smells like gas. And the first question is always the same: where's the shutoff?
Quite often, nobody knows.
That's not a criticism. Most people move into a house and learn where everything is gradually, as problems surface. The trouble is that some problems don't give you time to search. If a pipe lets go properly, you've got seconds before you're doing damage. Knowing where to go before anything goes wrong is one of the most useful things you can do as a homeowner, and it takes about twenty minutes.
Water
Every house has a toby valve somewhere between the street and the house. In New Zealand it's usually near the boundary, at ground level, under a small square or round lid. You may have two: one that belongs to the council (leave that alone) and one that belongs to you. Yours is the one closer to the house.
Find it now, while you don't need it. Lift the lid and have a look. Some tobys are easy to turn by hand. Others will need a toby key - a simple T-bar tool, about $15 at any hardware store - because they're deep or stiff. If it hasn't been turned in years, it may be stuck. Better to find that out on a Tuesday afternoon than at 11pm with water going somewhere it shouldn't.
Inside the house, look under every sink. There should be isolation valves on the hot and cold supply pipes to each tap. They look like small valves with a slot across the head. A flat-head screwdriver turns them. If the slot lines up with the pipe, it's open. Turned 90 degrees across the pipe, it's closed.
Gas
If you're on mains gas, the meter is almost always on an outside wall, usually at the front or side of the house. The shutoff valve is right there at the meter - a lever or a handle, depending on the meter type. When the lever runs parallel with the pipe, the gas is on. Turned 90 degrees so it runs across the pipe, it's off.
If you have LPG bottles, the shutoff is the valve on top of each bottle. Turn clockwise to close.
If you ever smell gas, don't start looking for the shutoff. Get everyone out, leave doors open as you go, don't touch any switches, and call your gas network or 111 from outside. The shutoff matters for a suspected minor leak or planned work. Not when the house smells like rotten eggs and you need to be fifty metres away from it.
Electricity
Your switchboard is the main panel for the electrical system. It might be inside the house, in the garage, or on an outside wall. Open it and have a look. There should be a main switch at the top that cuts power to everything. Below that you'll see individual circuit breakers, one per circuit. Some older boards have fuses instead of breakers.
The circuit breakers should be labelled. Often they're not, or the labels say things like "cct 4" which tells you nothing useful. If yours are unlabelled, it's worth spending an hour with someone plugging things in and flicking breakers to work out which is which. Write them on the panel with a permanent marker or stick a typed label sheet inside the door. It makes fault-finding considerably faster when something actually trips.
Know which breaker is the oven, which is the hot water cylinder, and which is the lights. If something trips, you'll know where to look without touching everything else first.
Twenty minutes now, a lot less trouble later
None of this is complicated. It's the kind of thing that used to get handed over when you bought a house, when the previous owner walked you around and showed you where everything was. That doesn't always happen.
Spend twenty minutes with this list and you'll know more about your house than most people who've lived in theirs for years. If you find something that's stuck, missing, or already gone wrong, that's what we're here for.
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