Leak Detection in Austin & San Antonio

Do the meter test. Make sure nothing in the house is using water: no running toilets, no ice maker cycling, no irrigation. Find your water meter, usually in a box near the street, and note the reading or watch the small leak indicator dial. Wait 20 to 30 minutes without using any water, then look again. If the reading changed or the dial moved, water is leaving the system somewhere between the meter and your fixtures. Next, walk the house barefoot and feel for warm tile, listen at quiet hours for running water, and check under sinks and around the water heater. If the meter moves and you cannot find the source, that is when leak detection earns its keep.

Two reasons: how our homes are built and what they sit on. Most houses here are slab-on-grade, with copper or older galvanized water lines run in or under the concrete. Much of Central Texas sits on expansive clay that swells after rain and shrinks hard in a dry summer, so the slab and the soil beneath it move a little every season. That movement works on the pipe year after year until a joint fails or a line wears through against the concrete. Very hard water adds to it, especially on the San Antonio side, where mineral-laden water is tough on copper over decades. None of this means your slab is failing. It means a pipe under it is, and that is repairable.

Not always, and often we would rather not. Once the leak is located, there are usually two ways to fix it. A direct repair opens the slab at that one spot, replaces the failed section and patches the concrete. A reroute abandons the leaking run under the slab and replaces it with new line through the attic or walls, which avoids the floor entirely and is often the better choice when the flooring is expensive or the line has leaked before. On an older home with a pattern of leaks, we will also give you a price for a full repipe, because fixing the same system one leak at a time gets expensive. You see all the numbers and pick.

Close enough to mark the floor or wall and open only that spot. Acoustic leak detection listens for the specific sound of pressurized water escaping a pipe, and the signal is loudest directly over the leak. Thermal imaging then shows the heat or moisture pattern to confirm it. Pressure isolation tells us in advance whether it is the hot or cold system, which keeps us from chasing the wrong line. Depth, slab thickness and background noise all affect the work, which is why we take the time to test rather than rush to a guess. The goal is one small opening, not an exploratory trench through your living room.