01 Sept 2026
If you have ever come home to water across the kitchen floor with no obvious source, the culprit is often a part most people have never looked at: the braided flexible hose under the sink.
What a flexible hose actually is
It is the short connector between your wall pipe and the tap or appliance. A rubber inner tube inside a woven stainless steel sleeve. It is convenient, it is cheap, and it is under mains pressure every second of every day.
That last part matters. Unlike a tap, a hose is never off duty.
Why they fail
- Age. The rubber liner hardens and the steel braid corrodes. Most manufacturers expect five to seven years, not fifteen.
- Overtightening. A hose cranked too hard at installation is already stressed before it does any work.
- Kinking. Bending a hose tight around a cabinet edge wears it from the inside.
- Cheap parts. A no-name hose saves a few dollars and fails years earlier.
When one lets go it does not drip. It releases mains pressure into your cabinet, and a kitchen floods faster than most people believe.
The signs worth checking for
Open the cabinet under your sink and look at the hose with a torch.
- Rust or brown staining anywhere on the braid
- Fraying, where individual steel strands have snapped and stick out
- Bulging or a soft spot in the sleeve
- Any dampness or white mineral crust at either fitting
Fraying is the one to act on immediately. A hose with broken strands is already failing, it just has not finished.
What to do right now
If you find any of those signs, close the isolation valve on the wall behind the hose and stop using that tap. Then get the hose replaced. This is a small job, and our sink repair and tap repair work covers it. You can see what jobs like this start at on our pricing page.
If the hose has already burst, shut your main stopcock before anything else and call us. Our emergency plumbing line runs 24 hours.
Preventing the next one
Replace flexible hoses on a schedule rather than waiting for a failure. If you cannot remember when yours were last changed, that is the answer.
Check them when you renovate, when you move in, and any time a plumber is already under the sink for something else. It costs very little to change a hose during a visit that is already happening.
A burst hose is one of the few plumbing failures that is genuinely predictable. Two minutes with a torch once a year is all the warning most people need.