Leak detection & pipe repair

Leak detection

The leaks that cost the most are the ones you cannot see

A dripping tap is irritating and it is honest — you know it is there and you know roughly what it is costing you. The expensive leaks are the quiet ones: a supply line weeping inside a wall cavity, a slab leak under the living room, a toilet flapper passing water into the bowl every few minutes all night. Those run for months. By the time there is a stain on the ceiling or a warm patch on the floor, you are not paying for a plumbing repair any more, you are paying for drywall, flooring, insulation and possibly remediation.

The cheapest possible version of this problem is the one you catch on the meter.

The meter test, in five minutes

Turn off every water-using thing in the house — taps, dishwasher, washing machine, ice maker. Go out to the meter and find the leak indicator, a small triangle or dial that turns whenever water is moving. If it is turning with nothing on, you have a leak somewhere between the meter and your fixtures. Write down the reading, do not use water for an hour, and read it again. A change with everything off is unambiguous.

That test costs nothing and it is worth running twice a year. It is also the first thing we do when someone calls about a bill that jumped, because it separates “there is a leak” from “somebody has been taking longer showers” before anyone starts opening walls.

Finding it without wrecking the house

Knowing there is a leak and knowing where it is are very different problems. Our order of operations is to isolate before we look: shutting off individual fixtures and branch lines and watching the meter tells us which part of the system is losing water, which often eliminates most of the house in a few minutes.

From there, acoustic listening equipment picks up the distinctive sound of pressurised water escaping — through concrete, through drywall, underground. A thermal camera adds the other half of the picture on hot-water lines, because escaping hot water leaves a heat signature on the surface above it. Between the two we can usually narrow a slab leak to a foot or so before anyone picks up a saw.

That narrowing is the entire value of the service. The repair itself is often quick; it is the searching that gets expensive when it is done by opening walls until something is found.

Galvanized pipe, and why Olde Town gets this a lot

Homes plumbed before roughly 1960 very often used galvanized steel supply line. It corrodes from the inside, and the corrosion is cumulative — the interior diameter narrows year after year until what was a three-quarter-inch pipe is passing water like a straw. The symptoms creep up so slowly that people adapt to them: pressure that drops away when a second tap opens, brown water after the house has sat empty, a shower that goes cold when someone runs the kitchen.

Individual sections can be replaced, and sometimes that is the right call. But once a house has had a few galvanized failures, replacing each one as it fails is throwing money at a pipe that is uniformly at the end of its life. A planned repipe done on your schedule is cheaper and far less traumatic than an unplanned one done on the pipe's schedule.

Toilets: the leak hiding in plain sight

A worn flapper lets water seep from tank to bowl continuously, and the fill valve tops the tank back up in short bursts you may never hear. It is easily the most common invisible water loss in a house, and it is one of the cheapest things in plumbing to fix. Put a few drops of food colouring in the tank, leave it half an hour, and check the bowl. Colour in the bowl means the flapper is passing. That is a part that costs less than lunch.