Water leak detection across the Phoenix valley

A leak that shows itself is the easy kind. The ones we get called out to are the other kind: a pool down a couple of inches by Monday, one warm patch of tile in a hallway, a bill that climbed while nothing changed. This page maps what each symptom means, how the leak is located, and which page to read next.

What a hidden leak looks like before anyone finds it

• The pool drops further than a bucket standing on its own step.
• The auto-fill runs more than it used to, or never quite stops.
• One patch of floor is warm underfoot, or a rug stays faintly damp in the same place.
• The meter’s low-flow indicator turns with every tap and valve in the house shut off.
• Gravel or decomposed granite stays dark in one spot between irrigation runs.
• The bill went up and nobody in the house did anything differently.

Any one of those is worth a call; two together usually tells us what to load.

Why this valley is so good at hiding leaks

Caliche and hardpan

Soils across greater Phoenix commonly hold clay, caliche or other hardpan at fairly shallow depth. Water leaving a buried pipe reaches that layer and runs sideways along it — down a utility trench, under a driveway, out to a low spot. A line can lose water for weeks with nothing showing above it, and when something does show it is often nowhere near the break. That is why we locate before we dig.

Slab-on-grade

Most Valley houses sit directly on a concrete slab, with the pressurised supply run beneath it. There is no crawl space, so a slab leak is found with pressure, sound and temperature rather than with a torch and a mirror.

Summer, and flood irrigation

An open pool genuinely loses water to the air here. Scottsdale Water publishes month-by-month evaporation figures for an open pool, and worked out per day, June comes to more than a third of an inch, with July barely behind. And on a flood-irrigated lot, the pipe past the Salt River Project delivery gate is private: the gates, valves, standpipes and buried laterals belong to the homeowners.

How the leak gets found

No single instrument finds every leak. The skill is picking the right one and knowing when it is lying to you.

Meter isolation

Before anything else: shut the house, the irrigation and the pool auto-fill, and watch the meter. That says whether water is moving and roughly where, which narrows the whole job.

Pressure testing

Isolate a line, put a gauge on it and watch whether it holds. It is the most honest test we have, because a line either holds or it does not. What it will not tell you is where.

Acoustic listening

Water escaping a pressurised pipe makes a steady hiss that carries through soil, concrete and tile. Ground microphones and a correlator turn that into a spot. It needs pressure and a quiet hour; it struggles on plastic pipe and on a low-pressure drip line.

Thermal imaging

Infrared reads surface temperature, not pipe and not moisture. It is very good on a hot-water line under tile and useless on a cold line in a house sitting at the same temperature.

Dye tracing and line tracing

Dye shows where still water is going at a crack or fitting in a pool shell. Line tracing maps where the pipe runs, which is what keeps one hole from becoming three.

What happens once it has an address

You get shown the spot and told what is happening there, in English or in Spanish, before anything is opened. Most of what we locate we also repair — see leak repair, pool leak repair and slab leak repair. The opening is only as big as the fix needs.

When it turns out not to be a leak

Sometimes it is evaporation, a stuck auto-fill valve, a backwash line left open, a longer billing period, or an irrigation timer somebody changed. We would rather tell you that than sell you work. The bucket test settles the pool version of this at home.

What we do not do

Worth saying plainly: leak detection and leak repair is all we do. No sewer work, no gas lines, no water heaters, no drain cleaning, no fixture or appliance installs. If it is a plumbing job with no leak in it, we will say so.