Finding the leak before we lift the floor

We do not publish a price for this one and we would rather explain why than invent a figure. A leak under a kitchen unit and a leak under a solid ground floor take the same first hour and completely different second, third and fourth ones. We give you a price for the trace before we start and a separate price for the repair once we know what has failed, and neither one moves after that without you agreeing it first.

Turn off every tap and appliance that uses water and look at your meter. Note the reading, leave it half an hour without using anything, and read it again. If it has moved, water is escaping somewhere. The other common signs are a boiler pressure gauge that keeps dropping, a warm patch on a floor, a musty smell in a cupboard, and a water bill that has climbed without your habits changing.

Often not, and that is the whole point of tracing before cutting. Acoustic listening, thermal imaging and tracer gas are all done from the surface, so the tracing itself does not damage anything. If the repair does need access, it is one board or one small section rather than a room, because by then we know where the fault is to within a few inches rather than a few metres.

That usually points at the buried supply pipe between the boundary and the house, which can leak for months into the ground without producing a single damp patch indoors. It shows up as a bill increase, a patch of front garden that stays green in a dry spell, or occasionally a drop in pressure. The meter test in the answer above will tell you whether it is inside or outside, and outside is where the question of who owns the pipe becomes worth several hundred pounds.

Many buildings policies include what is called trace and access cover, which pays towards finding the leak and putting right the damage caused by getting to it. Limits vary a lot, commonly somewhere between one and five thousand pounds, and the repair to the pipe itself is often excluded even where the access is covered. Check your schedule for the words trace and access before you book anything, and tell us if you are claiming so we photograph and write the job up in a form your insurer will accept.

Find the pipe coming into the house at the internal stopcock, usually under the kitchen sink or in a hallway cupboard. Lead is dull grey, has no seam, and the joints are swollen and rounded rather than sharply machined. Scrape it gently with a coin: lead goes shiny silver underneath and stays soft, while copper shows orange and galvanised steel stays grey and hard. Tapping it gives a dull thud rather than a ring. If you are still unsure, we will look at it while we are there.

Lead pipe is not a hazard the way asbestos is, but it does put a small amount of lead into water that sits in it, and the risk is taken seriously for young children and during pregnancy. Water companies add a phosphate dosing to the supply which lines the pipe and limits how much dissolves, which is why most Croydon houses with lead pipe test within limits. The sensible position is that lead is worth replacing when you have the chance rather than something to panic about tonight. In the meantime, run the kitchen tap for a minute or two first thing in the morning before filling a kettle, and never cook with hot water from the tap.

The pipe splits in two at your boundary. From the water main to the boundary stop tap is the communication pipe and belongs to your water company. From the boundary into the house is the supply pipe and belongs to you. Both Croydon suppliers run schemes that will replace their length of lead, usually on the condition that you have replaced yours, so the order you do things in matters. We can price your side and tell you which supplier to approach about theirs before you commit.

Not necessarily, and this is where a lot of money gets spent in the wrong place. Failed grout or sealant around a shower tray, a leaking waste trap and a cracked shower base all produce the same brown ring on a ceiling as a burst supply pipe, but they only leak when the bathroom is used, whereas a pressurised pipe leaks continuously. That difference is usually enough to tell them apart in one visit, and it decides whether you need a plumber or a tiler.

Yes, and there are two ways to do it. We can thermal image the run, break out a small section of screed at the fault, repair the pipe and make the floor good. Or, where the pipework is old microbore or the floor is tiled with something you cannot match, we reroute that leg entirely, running new pipe around the edge of the room or back through the void above. On a 1970s or 1980s Croydon house with microbore under screed, the reroute is very often the better answer, because a pipe that has failed once in a floor tends to do it again.

Yes. We work Monday to Saturday, 7am to 8pm, and we cover emergencies around the clock. For an active burst the emergency call-out is £120, which covers getting to you, stopping the water and telling you what the repair will cost. If you are waiting on us, turn the internal stopcock off, open the cold kitchen tap to drain the pipework down, and put a bucket under the drip.

We do both, and we think splitting them is the weak point in how leak detection is usually sold. A specialist who traces the leak, hands over a report and drives away leaves you to find a second trade, explain it again and pay a second call-out. Our engineers arrive with the tracing equipment and a van full of pipe and fittings, so on most jobs the leak is found and repaired in the same visit.