Advanced waterline
leak detection & repair

The leak you can see is rarely the leak

A wet patch on a floor tells you where water surfaced, not where it escaped. Pressurised water travels along the path of least resistance — under a slab, along a conduit, down the outside of a stack — and it can emerge metres from the actual break. That is why leak work starts with locating and not with a hammer: opening the wrong slab is an expensive way to learn nothing.

Signs worth a call

• A water bill that has climbed with no change in how you use water
• A meter that keeps moving with every fixture in the building closed
• Warm or damp spots on a floor slab
• Pressure that has quietly dropped off across the property
• Cracking, lifting or discoloured flooring in one area
• A musty smell in a room with no visible source
• Water at a foundation line, or a patch of lawn that never dries out

How we locate it

The property gets isolated section by section so the loss can be narrowed down to a single run before anything is opened. Pressure behaviour on an isolated section tells us whether we are looking at supply or drainage, and where along the run the loss sits. For drainage faults, a camera goes down the line and we watch the failure rather than infer it.

The point of all of it is the size of the opening. A located leak is a tile or two and a patch. An unlocated leak is a floor.

Repair, or replace the run

Once the fault is exposed, the honest answer is sometimes a section repair and sometimes a re-run. A single mechanical failure in otherwise sound copper is a repair. A line that has failed in three places in two years is telling you something, and patching it a fourth time is spending money to buy weeks.

Where a re-route is the better answer, we will say so and explain the trade-off, including what it costs to do it the other way. Both numbers, before anyone starts.

Underground and service-line work

Not every leak is inside. Water services, irrigation feeds and sewer laterals run under driveways, planting and pavement, and we do the excavation side of that work too — locate, expose, repair, backfill. Our recent work includes hand-digging to expose live lines beside occupied buildings and machine trenching on cleared sites.