Extraction and drying after a washer, dishwasher or ice-maker line leaks onto a slab floor. The machine itself goes to a repair technician.
Fastest: call (833) 490-5225. Or send this and we call you back.
An appliance leak starts with a failed hose, valve or drain and ends in wet flooring, swollen cabinet bases and sometimes a stained ceiling. Dallas Water Damage Restoration handles the water across Dallas and Dallas County, answering phones at every hour and assigning a crew as one frees up. The machine goes to a repair technician; a wall pipe goes to a Texas-licensed plumber.
Stop the machine and cut its water before anything else. A washer has a pair of supply valves on the wall behind it, a dishwasher is normally fed from a small valve under the kitchen sink, and a refrigerator's ice-maker line has its own little valve on the tubing or at the wall. If you cannot reach one, or it will not turn, the main valve stops everything. In many Dallas-area houses it sits in the meter box at the curb, and locating it on a calm afternoon beats hunting for it in a flooded laundry room.
An appliance leak differs from a burst pipe because it starts indoors, a few feet from the floor and often behind or beneath something heavy. With no basement under the kitchen, the water has nowhere to drain, so it fans out across the concrete, soaks the carpet pad, slips beneath the wall plates and creeps into the particleboard bottoms of the cabinets. A split hose is dramatic. A weeping ice-maker line behind the refrigerator can be silent for weeks.
Where the machine stands decides what gets wet. A kitchen puts the water under the cabinet bases, a garage corner sends it across the garage slab and beneath the shared wall, and a laundry closet on an upper floor puts it through the ceiling underneath. The crew handles the water; the appliance goes to a repair technician. Call (833) 490-5225 once the supply is off.
Because a slab floor gives water no place to go but sideways. A trickle from a loose hose spreads across concrete, soaks the pad under the carpet, wicks up the paper face of the drywall and finds the particleboard bottoms of the cabinets. The puddle you can see is the smallest part of the wet area.
Think about what sits directly on the concrete in a kitchen or laundry room: tack strip, carpet pad, the lowest inch of drywall, the bottom plate of every wall and the toe kick of every cabinet run. Each is porous or layered, and each draws water in by capillary action instead of waiting for a puddle to arrive. That is how a spill that looks like a damp towel's worth ends up wet two rooms away.
Time matters in a way that has little to do with how much water escaped. A hose that sprayed for ten minutes while someone was home is a smaller job than a drain line that dripped for a month behind a refrigerator, because the second soaked one spot again and again while the floor swelled, stained and began to smell. A meter reading tells the two apart; your eyes cannot.
Floors hide it differently. Tile and sheet vinyl look perfect while water sits beneath them, click-together planks swell at the seams, and carpet shows a dark, cool patch. A technician reads through all of them and checks the foot of each wall that the water might have passed beneath.
Not always. Water from a supply hose starts out clean, which the industry calls Category 1. Water that has been through a washer drum or a dishwasher, or that backed out of a drain hose, is Category 2, or gray water. The category decides how much carpet and pad is thrown out, so it is settled first.
S500, the ANSI/IICRC standard for professional water damage restoration, defines the water categories, and the IICRC is a trade association rather than a regulator. A sanitary source such as a broken supply line gives Category 1. Category 2 means significantly contaminated water, and washing-machine and dishwasher discharge are the standard examples. A washer that overflowed its standpipe puts Category 2 on the floor even though the water began as tap water.
The categories are not fixed. Clean water that sits and warms inside a closed house picks up contamination from carpet, dust and the floor itself, and a supply-line leak can drift toward Category 2 while it waits. Nobody can put an hour count on that drift, which is one more reason to start extraction quickly instead of waiting to see how the floor feels.
In practice, Category 1 on a hard floor is a drying job. Category 2 on carpet usually means the carpet comes up, the pad is discarded and the slab is cleaned and treated before drying equipment goes in. Gloves, boots and keeping children and pets off the wet floor make sense whichever category it turns out to be.
Often, yes. A base cabinet is a box sitting on damp concrete, so the crew removes the toe kick, drills small holes where needed and pushes dry air through the box. Solid-wood doors and face frames tend to survive. A particleboard base that has swollen, crumbled or delaminated is replaced, and the readings decide which you have.
A run of base cabinets is a row of sealed boxes, and a sealed box does not dry because a fan is pointed at its door. The toe kick is the thin board across the bottom front; it comes off with a pry bar and goes back afterward, and behind it is the only direct path to the wet cavity. Small holes drilled low in the back or bottom of a box, hidden later, let air move through it instead of around it.
What survives depends on the material and the time. The countertop, the doors and a solid face frame rarely need to move. The particleboard floor of the box is another story: once it has soaked up water and swollen at the edges it does not shrink back, and a base that sags under a stack of dishes tells you more than a meter does. Replacement is a repair-stage decision, quoted after drying.
Dishwashers add one detail. The machine sits in an opening cut into the cabinet run, and a leak at its supply line or door seal sends water under the neighboring cabinets from the side. Pulling the dishwasher out is part of reading the floor. Reconnecting it falls to an appliance technician or a plumber, not the drying crew.
A broken washing-machine hose is one of the examples the Texas Department of Insurance gives for sudden and accidental water damage, which most Texas homeowner policies cover. A leak that seeped for months is a different question, and wording varies by insurer. Ask your agent; your insurer makes the decision.
The line an insurer draws is time. A hose that split on Tuesday is sudden. A refrigerator line that dripped behind the unit since spring, soaking the flooring and cabinet bases a little each day, can look gradual on paper whatever it felt like to you. That is why photographs and dates matter, and why a leak is worth reporting the day you find it rather than after the drying is finished.
Two questions are worth putting to your agent before you assume anything. Does the policy treat damage to the appliance itself differently from damage to the floors and cabinets around it? And what does it say about flooring and cabinet bases that have to be replaced after drying? The declarations page and the policy wording answer both.
Keep the failed hose or fitting in a bag, photograph the appliance's data plate and every wet room before anything is moved, and request the moisture readings and the drying log from the crew when the job closes. The Texas water damage insurance guide covers the typical exclusions in plain language, and a stalled claim can go to the Texas Department of Insurance.
Three trades, and the crew is only one of them. An appliance technician repairs or replaces the machine, a Texas-licensed plumber handles a pipe or valve inside the wall, and the restoration crew extracts, dries and documents. Repair work after drying is a fourth stage, quoted separately once the readings say dry.
Plumbing work in Texas falls under Occupations Code Chapter 1301, and the Texas State Board of Plumbing Examiners lets you look up a plumber's license on its website before anyone opens a wall. Swapping a worn hose on the back of a machine is a different scale of job from replacing a corroded valve inside the wall, and whoever does the work will tell you which one you have.
The trades overlap in time without getting in each other's way. Extraction and drying can begin while you wait for the repair visit, provided the supply is off, and the repair can happen with air movers running in the next room. Drying does not have to wait for a replacement machine to be delivered.
The rebuild comes last: drywall, toe kicks, trim, flooring and sometimes cabinet bases. Texas has no state general-contractor license, so permits are a local matter, and repair work after water damage may need one from your city. Highland Park, University Park and Cockrell Hill each run their own permitting, separate from Dallas.
Do not touch an appliance, its plug or its cord while you are standing in water. Switch off the breaker only when the panel is dry and reachable without wading; otherwise stay out and call. Treat washer and dishwasher discharge as dirty water, with gloves, boots and children and pets kept away. Do not tip or drag a loaded washer or a refrigerator across a wet floor, and leave a gas dryer's connection alone until the gas has been shut off.
The supply to the machine is shut, the appliance is switched off, and the technician checks the outlets, cords and breaker near the wet floor before anyone steps in. If the shut-off valve itself is the leak, the water goes off at the main valve instead.
Washers, dishwashers and refrigerators are moved just far enough to see the floor and the wall behind them, because the worst of the water tends to be where nobody looks. A thermal camera and moisture meters trace the wet area outward from the machine and across the wall plates into the next room.
Water from a supply hose is clean at the source. Water from a washer drum, a dishwasher or a drain hose that slipped its standpipe is gray, and that changes what comes out. The category is written down at the start, because it drives the rest of the plan.
Standing water is pulled off the floor, wet pad comes up, and toe kicks are taken off so the cabinet cavities can be reached. Click-together flooring is lifted in sections where it has trapped water, and small holes may be drilled low in a cabinet base so dry air can pass through the box.
Air movers and dehumidifiers run on the floor, the wall bases and the cabinet cavities, and the same marked points are read on each visit against material the water never reached. One room commonly takes three to five days, and the readings decide when the equipment leaves.
You receive photos, the readings and a list of what was removed, to pass to your insurer. Keep the failed hose for the repair technician. Toe kicks, flooring, drywall and any cabinet bases are quoted once the numbers say dry, and the contractor can tell you which city permits the work needs.
The supply hoses sit under constant pressure and can split at a coupling or burst along the braid. The drain hose can slip out of the standpipe, or the standpipe can back up and overflow. The first failure sends clean water and the second sends gray water, so one laundry room can produce two different cleanups.
The supply line, the drain hose, the door seal and the pump housing can each leak, and the water runs under the neighboring cabinets from the side. Dishwasher discharge is gray water. A slow leak from the door seal can soften the floor in front of the machine long before anyone sees a puddle.
A thin plastic or copper line runs from a valve to the back of the refrigerator, and it can kink when the unit is pushed back or crack at a fitting. The drip is small and constant and tends to run under the flooring and into the cabinet beside it, which is how a quiet leak becomes a large job.
A garbage disposal, a filtration unit, an instant-hot tap or a drain trap adds fittings to a cabinet that holds cleaning supplies and gets looked at rarely. Water heaters and air conditioners have their own pages: see water heater leak cleanup and AC condensate leak water damage.
Appliance jobs are priced by the area that got wet and by what the water crossed on its way, so a clean hose failure and a washer drain overflow land on different rows. These rows cover the water side only; the machine and any plumbing belong to their own trades.
| Job | Typical range | What it includes |
|---|---|---|
| Water heater or appliance leak cleanup (extraction + drying, one area) | $800–$3,000 (plumber's repair not included) | Plumber's repair not included; neither is repairing or replacing the appliance |
| Category 1 (clean water) mitigation, one room or small area | $1,200–$4,000 | A supply hose or ice-maker line caught early |
| Category 2 (gray water) mitigation, one room or small area | $2,500–$6,500 | Washer or dishwasher discharge, with more material removed |
| Wet carpet pad removal and disposal (per sq ft) | $0.75–$2.00 | Pad beside a laundry room or kitchen holds water against the slab |
| Structural drying for one room (3–5 days, equipment + monitoring) | $800–$2,500 | Includes reaching the cabinet cavities and re-reading the same points daily |
| Ceiling water damage repair (one section, incl. texture + paint) | $450–$1,800 | Where an upstairs laundry or bath leaked into the room below |
Estimates for Dallas County in 2026. You hear and approve the emergency-stage price first. A new hose or machine, plumbing work and the rebuild once the area is dry are each quoted on their own.
Tell us what's happening and we'll tell you honestly whether it's a quick fix, and what appliance leak water damage should cost.
Washing-machine hoses are a typical failure in the 1970s to 2000s slab subdivisions of DeSoto, Duncanville, Lancaster, Red Bird, Sunnyvale and newer Irving, where upstairs bathrooms are also a typical source of ceiling leaks. Wherever a machine or a bathroom sits over a living area, the first sign is often a brown ring on the ceiling below it rather than water on the floor.
The 1950s to 1970s slab ranch streets of Garland, Mesquite, Richardson, Pleasant Grove, Balch Springs, Lake Highlands and Northwest Dallas keep everything on one level. A washer in a garage corner sends water across the garage slab and under the shared wall, and one in a hall closet feeds carpet in both directions. In the older pier-and-beam houses of Oak Cliff and East Dallas the water takes the opposite route, down through the floor, which the pier-and-beam crawl space page picks up.
Freeze weather reaches appliances in a way people forget. A washer or utility sink on a garage or exterior wall shares that wall's exposure, and its supply connections can split in a hard freeze like February 2021, which dropped DFW to -2 °F on the 16th after roughly twelve days of freezing weather. The leak starts on the thaw, much as it does for a pipe in an attic.
Extraction and drying after an attic, garage or closet tank lets go, while a licensed plumber handles the heater itself.
Stains, sags and soaked insulation from attic equipment, hail-worn roofs and upstairs bathrooms, traced, dried and refinished.
Drying slab floors, wall cavities and framing to a measured standard, with readings logged daily instead of guessed.
Pumping, extraction and same-visit drying setup for standing water in Dallas homes, apartments and businesses.
Not sure if you're covered? Check your ZIP code.
Not until the failed part has been replaced and the floor has been read with a meter. A machine that leaked once and runs again adds water to a floor that may still be wet underneath, and a repaired hose is only as good as the fitting it screws onto. Ask the technician to test the connection with the machine running.
Sometimes. Click-together planks can be lifted in sections, dried and relaid if the core did not swell, while glued-down or swollen planks generally come up. Tile holds up better but traps water beneath it, so it is read rather than judged by eye. The meter and a look at the plank edges decide, and you see both.
The line is shut off, the refrigerator is slid out, and the wet area is mapped under the flooring and the cabinets beside it. A long leak means more material is wet, and an insurer may view it as gradual, so report it now. If growth has appeared, Texas licenses mold work through TDLR at 25 contiguous square feet, and it bars one license holder from doing both jobs, so no one company can sell you testing and removal as a package.
One restoration job with several parts. The crew dries the laundry floor, opens and dries the wet ceiling cavity and checks the wall that carries the water down, while a repair technician or plumber deals with the machine or its connection. The ceiling work is covered on the ceiling water damage page.
Enough to read the floor and the wall behind them, with the water and power off. Heavy lifting, disconnecting a gas line and electrical work are not the drying crew's job, so a gas dryer or a built-in unit may need the appliance technician or the plumber to disconnect it first. Contents that have to leave the room can be packed out, cleaned and stored.
Close the washer's supply valves, look under the sink at the dishwasher's lines, and check the floor behind the refrigerator for a dark ring. Holiday weeks give a small leak the longest run, because nobody is home to hear it. A battery leak alarm on the floor, or an automatic shut-off valve fitted by a plumber, adds a second line of defense.
One room commonly takes three to five days of equipment, with the same marked points read each visit. The EPA's guideline of drying within 24 to 48 hours is the reason equipment goes in early, but it is a guideline, not a deadline, and the EPA notes mold may have grown even when materials were dried inside that time. That is why the cabinet bases keep being read after the surface feels dry.