If one has burst right now
Turn off the small isolation tap on the pipe under the sink or behind the vanity. If there isn’t one, or it won’t turn, shut off the water at the mains at your front boundary. Then open a tap to drain the pipes.
Call R&G on 0461 330 531 for emergency plumbing in Sydney. $0 call-out fee, 24 hours.
A burst flexi hose is the most expensive $20 failure in your house, and there is almost certainly one under your kitchen sink right now.
One in ten home water damage claims in Australia comes from one letting go, and the average claim is $30,000. The hose itself costs less than a takeaway coffee round to replace.
What a Flexi Hose Is, and Why They Fail
It is the short, silver, braided hose that connects your tap or toilet to the water supply. Rubber on the inside, woven stainless steel on the outside.
They replaced rigid copper connections because they fit quickly into tight cabinets. If any plumbing work has been done on your property in the last twenty years, you have them.
The rubber is not what fails. The braiding does. Steel strands rust and snap one at a time, and each one that goes puts more load on the rest. When enough have gone, the rubber balloons through the gap and splits.
The other cause is installation. A hose that was twisted, kinked or stretched to reach its fitting is under permanent stress and will fail years earlier than one fitted with a gentle loop.
Some last twenty years. Others fail in five, and there is no way to tell which you have without looking at it.
What It Costs When One Lets Go
Main pressure does not stop because nobody is home. A hose that bursts at 22 am or on the first day of a holiday keeps delivering at full pressure until someone closes a valve.
Suncorp puts the figures in its May 2026 analysis of flexi hose claims.
| Figure | Amount |
|---|---|
| Average burst flexi hose claim | $30,000 |
| The same figure a year earlier | $27,500 |
| Share of these claims above $100,000 | 6% |
| Share of home water damage claims caused by a burst hose | 1 in 10 |
| Cost of the hose itself | Under $20 |
A failed hose releases enough water in 24 hours to fill a small swimming pool. One Queensland family came home from overseas to find a bathroom hose had been running for two days through six bedrooms, the kitchen and the lounge. The rebuild came to more than $500,000.
Suncorp’s earlier analysis of 22,000 water damage claims found the damage gets worse between November and April, for the obvious reason that this is when houses sit empty.
The Ten Minute Check You Should Do This Weekend
Open the cabinet under the kitchen sink, clear out the cleaning products and get a torch on the hoses behind the bowl. Do the same at every bathroom vanity, the laundry and behind the toilet.
You are looking for four things.
- Rust spots or brown staining on the braiding, particularly near the fittings at either end
- Fraying, where steel strands have broken and stand away from the weave. Run a dry cloth along it, and if it snags, strands are gone.
- Kinks or sharp bends, especially where the hose has been forced into a tight space
- Any sign of moisture, including a damp cabinet floor, swollen chipboard or a white crust around the fittings
Suncorp inspected thousands of hoses over six months and about 30 per cent needed replacing, roughly two per home. Sixty per cent of homeowners have never had theirs looked at.
A slow weep deserves as much attention as obvious damage. It rots the cabinet base and the floor beneath it long before anyone notices. If your water bill has climbed without explanation, leak detection will find what the cabinet is hiding.
What Your Insurer Will and Won’t Pay For
Escape of liquid coverage generally pays for the water damage. It does not pay to replace the thing that leaked. CHOICE’s review of burst pipe and leak cover puts it plainly: escape of liquid does not cover “fixing or replacing the item that leaked”, so the $20 hose is yours.
Two exclusions matter more than that one.
About a fifth of insurers exclude gradual leaks entirely. The rest cover only a hidden leak that a reasonable person would not have spotted, which matters when the leak sat behind a cupboard door you could have opened. Damage from a leak caused by poor maintenance is also excluded.
Read together, those two clauses are the reason the ten-minute check is not just about avoiding damage. A hose with visible rust that has been weeping into a cabinet for a year is a very different conversation with an assessor than one that burst without warning.
Keep the evidence either way. Photograph the failed hose before anyone removes it, photograph the damage before you dry things out, and keep the plumber’s invoice with the cause written on it. In the dispute CHOICE documents, the homeowners commissioned their own assessment, took it to the Australian Financial Complaints Authority and recovered over $150,000.
When to Replace Them, and With What
Replace any hose showing rust, fraying or a kink now, not at the next service. Replace all of them on sight if you have just bought a property and have no idea how old they are.
Beyond that, treat them as a wear item rather than permanent plumbing, and have them checked whenever a plumber is already on site for something else.
Two things are worth paying for. A hose with WaterMark certification rather than the cheapest on the shelf, because braiding quality is the whole product. And fitting it properly, with a gentle loop and no twist, by someone who will add an isolation tap if there isn’t one.
That isolation tap is the single best upgrade under a sink. It means the next failure is a two-second fix at the cabinet rather than a trip to the front boundary in the dark.
Older properties carry more of this risk, because more plumbing work has been done over more decades by more people and nobody has a record of when each hose went in. The same pattern shows up across the other plumbing problems in older Sydney homes.
If One Has Already Burst
Stop the water first. Turn off the isolation tap under the sink if there is one, or the mains tap at your front boundary if there isn’t. Then switch the power off at the board if water has reached a powerpoint or light fitting, and do not touch either until it has dried.
Get the standing water out with a mop or a wet vacuum rather than waiting for it to dry, and do not throw the hose away. It is the evidence.
A burst hose under a vanity and a burst pipe inside a wall look similar from the hallway, but they are different jobs. What you do in the first ten minutes decides whether this is a dried-out cabinet or a replaced floor.
Not sure what you are looking at
Send us a photo of the hose. Call R&G on 0461 330 531, and we will tell you whether it needs replacing today or whether it can wait. $0 call-out fee, 24 hours.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does a flexi hose last?
There is no fixed lifespan. Suncorp reports that some run for twenty years without trouble while others corrode and fail much faster, which is why the only reliable answer is to look at the braiding rather than the date it was fitted. If you cannot remember having one replaced, assume it is due for a check.
Can I replace a flexi hose myself?
The part is sold in hardware stores, but the failure modes are almost all installation faults, so a self-fitted hose that is slightly twisted or overtightened can fail sooner than the one it replaced. In NSW, most plumbing work on a water supply connection is licensed work. Given the downside costs, this is not the job to save forty dollars on.
Does home insurance cover a burst flexi hose?
Escape of liquid cover generally pays for the resulting water damage but not for replacing the hose itself. Cover is narrower where the leak was gradual rather than sudden, or where it followed poor maintenance, and both exclusions vary between insurers. Check your own product disclosure statement rather than assuming, and photograph everything before it gets cleaned up.
Should I turn the water off before going on holiday?
Yes, if you will be away more than a day. Suncorp recommends it specifically because flexi hose claim costs rise through the November to April holiday stretch, when a burst runs unnoticed for days instead of minutes. Closing the mains tap at the front boundary takes two minutes and removes the risk entirely.
Are flexi hoses on toilets and laundries the same risk?
Same hose, same failure, and often worse because nobody opens a cistern or looks behind a washing machine. The laundry is the worst of them, since the hoses sit under constant pressure, get knocked by the machine and are usually the oldest in the house. Check them with the same torch on the same afternoon.
Found rust on a hose
We replace flexi hoses, fit isolation taps and attend burst hoses across the Upper North Shore, the Hills District and the Parramatta and Ryde corridor. Fixed price before any work starts, and no call-out fee. If you have let go right now, we are available 24 hours for emergency plumbing.
