Leak Detection Services
The most expensive leaks are the ones you never see. Behind walls, under slabs, beneath the yard, water works quietly on your home every hour until someone finds it. Our leak detection services locate hidden leaks with acoustic, thermal, and pressure-based instruments, then fix them with surgical precision instead of exploratory demolition.
Find My LeakWhere hidden leaks live
Plumbing runs through parts of a home nobody looks at, which is exactly why leaks thrive there. These are the usual suspects, in the order we find them.
- Under the slab. Hot and cold supply lines routed beneath concrete foundations fail with age, abrasion, and soil movement. Classic tells: warm spots on the floor, the sound of running water with everything off, and a water heater that never seems to rest.
- Inside walls. Pinhole leaks in copper and failed fittings at fixtures wick into framing and drywall. By the time a stain appears, the leak is usually weeks old.
- At fixture connections. Supply hoses, angle stops, and drain traps under sinks fail quietly behind cabinet doors and vanity clutter.
- The service line. The buried pipe between the meter and the house can leak for months, visible only as a mysteriously high bill or a soft green patch in the lawn.
- Toilets. A worn flapper silently sends water from tank to bowl to sewer, and it is the single most common leak in any home. Our guide to fixing a running toilet covers it step by step.
The technology that finds leaks without tearing your home apart
Old-school leak hunting meant opening walls until someone got lucky. Modern plumbing leak detection is an instrument discipline: we narrow the search zone with data, confirm with a second method, and only then open exactly what needs opening.
Acoustic listening equipment
Pressurized water escaping a pipe produces a signature hiss that travels along the pipe and through surrounding material. Ground microphones and contact sensors amplify it thousands of times, letting a trained technician follow the sound to its loudest point, often localizing a leak within inches, even under concrete.
Thermal imaging cameras
Wet drywall and slab moisture change surface temperature in ways invisible to the eye but obvious to an infrared sensor. Thermal scans sweep whole rooms in minutes and reveal the true footprint of moisture, which routinely extends far beyond the visible stain.
Pressure isolation testing
By valving off sections of the system and watching calibrated gauges, we prove which zone is losing pressure and which is sound. It is the difference between “somewhere in the house” and “the hot side, between the manifold and the kitchen.”
Tracer gas detection
For the stubborn cases, we introduce a safe, inert hydrogen-nitrogen mix into an empty line. The tiny gas molecules escape at the leak point, rise through soil or slab, and a surface probe pinpoints them. It finds leaks acoustic methods cannot hear.
In-pipe camera inspection
For drain and sewer leaks, a camera goes inside the pipe itself and shows the failure on screen: the crack, the offset joint, the root mass. Paired with a locator wand, it marks position and depth from above ground. Structural findings route straight to our sewer line repair team.
Moisture meters and mapping
Pin and pinless meters quantify how wet materials actually are, letting us map the damage boundary, verify after repair that everything is drying, and give your insurer hard numbers instead of adjectives.
Our five-step leak detection process
Listen to the evidence
Bills, sounds, stains, meter behavior. Your observations set the initial search zones before an instrument comes off the truck.
Verify a leak exists
A controlled meter test confirms real water loss and tells us whether it is on the pressurized supply side or the drainage side.
Isolate the zone
Pressure testing narrows the leak to a system section: hot or cold, inside or outside, fixture branch or main run.
Pinpoint the source
Acoustic, thermal, or tracer gas methods converge on the exact spot, cross-checked with a second method before we mark it.
Repair and verify
We open only the marked spot, make the repair, retest under pressure, and document everything for your records and insurance.
The 15-minute DIY meter test
Suspect a leak but not sure? Run this simple check before you call, and tell us the result. It makes your diagnosis faster and sometimes saves you the visit.
- Turn off every fixture and water-using appliance in the house, including ice makers and irrigation.
- Find your water meter and photograph the reading, including the small sweep dial or flow indicator.
- Watch the flow indicator for two minutes. If it moves with everything off, water is leaving your system somewhere.
- Now close the main shut-off valve at the house and check again. If the indicator stops, the leak is inside the house. If it keeps moving, the leak is in the buried service line between meter and home.
- No movement either way? Wait 30 minutes without using water and compare readings. Slow creep across half an hour catches small leaks the two-minute watch misses.
For the full symptom checklist, from musty odors to mystery bill spikes, read our guide: 12 signs of a hidden water leak.
Why speed matters more than people think
Before the numbers, a note on how leaks behave over time, because it explains the urgency better than any invoice. A pinhole leak does not stay a pinhole. Escaping water erodes the metal at the exit point the way a river carves its bank, so flow rates climb month over month. On the drain side, small leaks saturate the soil around the pipe, the soil movement stresses the pipe further, and the crack grows. Every hidden leak is on a trajectory, and the only unknown is the slope. Finding it early does not just cap the damage done so far; it interrupts the compounding.
Water damage is not linear. A slow leak spends its first weeks soaking insulation and framing where nobody sees it. Mold needs only 24 to 48 hours of sustained moisture to establish, and once it colonizes wall cavities, the remediation bill dwarfs the plumbing repair many times over. Foundations are patient victims too: soil that saturates and dries repeatedly under a slab moves, and the slab moves with it, which is how a pinhole under the kitchen becomes a cracked tile floor and a sticking back door eighteen months later.
The financial math is blunt. A located-and-repaired pinhole leak is a modest, single-visit job. The same leak discovered a season later routinely involves drywall, flooring, cabinetry, mold remediation, and an insurance negotiation. Insurers also increasingly distinguish between sudden damage, which policies cover, and long-term neglect, which they often do not. Documented professional detection, with instrument findings and photographs, is precisely the evidence that keeps a claim in the covered column.
Leaks on the hot side carry a second, sneakier cost: every gallon that escapes was heated on your dime, so the leak inflates both the water bill and the energy bill while quietly overworking the heater itself. If your water heater runs constantly or your hot water seems weaker than it was, the heater may be fine and the pipe may be guilty. Our water heater services team sees this pattern weekly, and detection settles it in one visit. And when a hidden leak finally announces itself as water pouring through a ceiling, skip the diagnostics queue and call emergency plumbing directly.
Slab leaks: the special case that earns its reputation
Of everything we locate, leaks under concrete foundations generate the most anxiety, partly because the word “slab” arrives attached to imagined jackhammers. The reality is more manageable, and knowing the playbook removes most of the fear.
Slab leaks happen because many homes, particularly from the 1960s through the 1990s, routed copper supply lines through or beneath the foundation. Copper in contact with concrete and soil faces chemistry it was never going to win forever: electrolysis, abrasion where pipes cross gravel or rebar as the line expands and contracts with temperature, and corrosion accelerated by aggressive soils. Hot lines fail first and most often, because thermal movement is constant, which is why the classic slab leak presents as a warm floor patch, a water heater that never rests, and a hot-side meter test that will not sit still.
Detection under concrete uses everything in the toolkit at once: acoustic gear tuned for the transmission properties of slab, thermal imaging to map the heat plume of a hot-side leak, and pressure isolation to prove which line is guilty before anyone marks the floor. The pinpoint matters enormously here, because the repair options diverge in cost by thousands of dollars depending on precision. A leak located within a hand’s width supports a single-opening direct repair. A vague “somewhere under the hallway” does not.
The repair conversation then has three honest branches. Direct access opens the slab at the marked spot, repairs the pipe, and closes it, the right answer when the line is otherwise healthy. Rerouting abandons the failed run and routes new PEX overhead through walls and attic, the right answer when one leak is really the first symptom of a failing generation of pipe, because it takes the entire buried run out of the game without touching the floor. Whole-line epoxy coating suits some configurations in between. We quote the branches side by side, with the age and condition evidence that points to one over another, and the choice stays yours.
From found to fixed: what happens after the mark goes down
Locating the leak is half the service. The other half is turning that mark into a dry, documented, warrantied repair with as little collateral opening as possible.
For leaks inside walls and ceilings, we open a deliberate, minimal access at the mark, repair the failed fitting or pinhole with new material rather than patch products, pressure-test the section, and leave the opening clean-edged and ready for drywall repair, photographed for your records. For service line leaks between meter and house, options run from spot excavation at the located point to trenchless replacement of the whole run when the line’s material argues it is on borrowed time. For drain-side leaks, the camera footage dictates the fix, and structural problems route to our sewer repair team with the diagnosis already complete.
Every repair closes with verification: the meter test that started your visit is repeated to prove the system now holds still, moisture readings confirm affected materials are drying rather than wicking, and you receive the documentation package, findings, photos, and repair details, that supports insurance claims and future home sales alike. If drying equipment or remediation beyond plumbing is needed, we tell you plainly and coordinate rather than leaving you to quarterback contractors from a wet hallway.
Leak detection questions, answered
What does leak detection cost, and is it ever wasted money?
Detection is priced as a diagnostic visit, and we credit it toward repair work you approve, so in practice it is rarely a standalone expense. Is it ever wasted? Occasionally a hunt ends with good news: the meter movement traces to an irrigation valve, a toilet flapper, or a billing anomaly rather than a concealed pipe failure, and you leave with certainty instead of a repair. We count those as successes. The genuinely expensive outcome is the opposite one, where months of “probably nothing” ends in a remediation project that a single diagnostic visit would have prevented.
How accurate is electronic leak detection?
On pressurized lines, modern acoustic and tracer gas methods routinely localize leaks within a few inches to a foot, even through slab concrete. Accuracy depends on pipe material, depth, and background noise, which is why we confirm with a second method before marking a spot. The practical result: we open one small area, not a wall’s worth of guesses.
Will you have to break my slab?
Only if the repair itself requires it, and often not even then. Once a slab leak is pinpointed, options include a direct access repair at the marked spot, rerouting that line segment overhead through walls or attic, or epoxy lining in suitable pipe. We price the options and explain the tradeoffs; homeowners are frequently surprised how often rerouting beats jackhammering.
My water bill jumped but I see no water anywhere. Now what?
That pattern is the textbook hidden leak. Run the 15-minute meter test above. If the indicator moves with everything off, call us with that result and we will take it from there. If it does not move, the spike may be irrigation, a toilet flapper leaking intermittently, or a billing anomaly, all of which we can help you rule out in order of likelihood.
Is a running toilet really worth worrying about?
A silently leaking flapper can waste 200 gallons a day, which is a swimming pool every few weeks, on your bill. It is also the cheapest fix in plumbing. Food coloring in the tank reveals it: if color reaches the bowl within 15 minutes without flushing, the flapper leaks. Our running toilet guide walks you through the fix, and we are happy to do it during any visit.
How long does a leak detection visit take?
Most residential detections run one to three hours from arrival to a marked location, depending on how much system there is to isolate and how deep the leak hides. Slab and underground service line leaks sit at the longer end because confirmation with a second method is non-negotiable before anyone opens concrete or soil. Bring your recent water bills and any observations you have logged; five minutes of your history routinely saves an hour of instrument time.
Can you detect leaks in irrigation and pool plumbing too?
Yes. Irrigation systems are frequent silent offenders because they run unwatched at dawn and their leaks water the subsoil rather than the surface. Pool and spa plumbing adds pressure-testable circuits we isolate line by line. If your meter test says the leak is outside but the service line proves sound, these systems are the next suspects in line, and the same acoustic and pressure methods apply.
Do smart leak detectors replace professional detection?
They complement it well. Whole-home flow monitors catch abnormal usage patterns and can auto-close the main valve during a catastrophic failure, and puck-style sensors under sinks and heaters cheaply guard known risk points. What they cannot do is tell you where a hidden leak physically is. Detection instruments and an experienced ear still do the pinpointing.