Leak Detection & Repair

You probably have a hidden leak if

Your water bill jumped and nothing about your household changed.
The meter is still ticking over with every tap in the house shut off.
There is a warm patch on a tile floor, or a section of floor that is always damp.
You can hear running water in a wall at night when the house is quiet.
A musty smell keeps coming back in one room no matter how often you clean.
Paint is bubbling or baseboards are swelling along one wall.

How we actually find it

Isolate firstWe shut off zones and watch the meter to work out whether it is supply side, drain side, irrigation or the pool before anyone drills anything.
ListenAcoustic equipment picks up pressurised water escaping through a pinhole. On a slab leak that sound is often the only clue there is.
ConfirmPressure test the line and, where it helps, thermal imaging to narrow the spot down to a small area rather than a wall.
Open the smallest hole that worksThen repair or reroute, depending on whether the pipe has one bad spot or is failing generally.

What it looks like when we find one

Dug down onto the leak. Water is still surfacing around the line.

By the time we open the ground we already know where the leak is, which is why the hole is the size it is. The locating is the work; the digging is the easy part.

The same joint, before and after

Copper pipe elbow in a joist bay with heavy green corrosion crusted around the joint — Before

The same run rebuilt in new copper with press-fit couplings and a new elbow — After

Crust that thick does not form overnight. This joint had been weeping slowly for a long time, soaking the framing around it while the ceiling below still looked fine — which is exactly why the leak had to be located rather than looked for. The repair is a short section of new copper, not the whole run.

Why this happens so often here

A lot of South Florida housing stock runs copper under a concrete slab, and decades of slightly aggressive water eats pinholes through it from the inside. Add a high water table and warm ground and a slab leak stays wet instead of drying out, which is why the first sign is often a smell or a warm tile rather than a puddle. Older buildings in Miami-Dade and Broward also still have galvanized branch lines that rust closed and then split at the threads.

What it costs

Tracing a hidden leak takes equipment and time, so it carries a diagnostic fee. You get that number on site, before anything gets opened up. Once we know what we are dealing with, the repair itself is quoted flat-rate on site, before any work starts. If a whole line is failing rather than one spot, we will say so rather than sell you the same repair three times.

Common questions

Will you have to break my floor?

Sometimes, but the whole point of locating properly first is to open one small area rather than guess across a room. Where a line has multiple failures, rerouting overhead or through a wall is often cheaper and less destructive than chasing it through the slab.

Can you tell if it is the pool or the irrigation?

Yes, and that is part of isolating. Pool and irrigation losses get blamed on plumbing constantly. We rule them in or out before quoting a repair.

My insurance wants a report. Can you provide one?

We can document what we found and what we did. Bear in mind most policies treat sudden damage differently from long-term seepage, so the sooner you call the better your position.

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