Plumbing Leak Detection – How To Guide

What is a Plumbing Leak?

A plumbing leak, sometimes known as an ‘escape of water’, is when water leaks from the plumbing pipework in your property. Plumbing leak detection is the process of finding those leaks, especially in hidden places.

Because plumbing pipes (usually copper of plastic) are often hidden behind walls, ceilings (sometimes first spotted because of damp patch on ceilings), floors or can even be underground water leaks. That makes plumbing leak detection a specialist task in comparison to work by local plumbers.

Our leak detection engineers are experts in early plumbing leak detection. They are highly trained, experienced and have access to a range of the best leak detectors to maximise the chances of finding a leak. Wherever possible, this is done with non-invasive techniques, with disruption to your property kept to as minimal as possible.

Are Plumbing Leaks Common?

Plumbing leaks are the most common type of water leak, making up 8 of the 10 top water leak causes in the home. They are also one of the most common insurance claims that people make, so plumbing leak detection is in demand throughout the year, especially in winter months. This is, in part, why insurance companies created trace and access cover on home insurance, meaning that both finding a leak at your property, and the damage caused, could be paid for by your insurance company.

We produce insurance grade plumbing leak detection reports, which you can provide to your insurance company to help with your claim. We work with many of the top insurance companies in the UK too.

How do I Stop my Plumbing Leaking?

The first challenge is to find your leak, which is where plumbing leak detection specialists such as ourselves come into the picture, we are experts in leak detection and have a high success rate of finding water leaks in your home or business. We don’t just stop when we find one water leak too, we check to see if there are any other signs of leak in your property.

How each of these leaks are fixed will depend on where they are, how big the leak is, what other damage has been done and the types of material that are affected. We can help with that.

Plumbing leak detection is a specialist skill, so if you need help, contact us today.

You may be interested in our useful article explaining central heating leak sealer, where we explain how it works and the detailed pros and cons of it.

Types of Plumbing Leak and How To Find them

As we said earlier, there are many different types of plumbing leaks, which means that we use various methods to find leaks. There is not one single way of finding a leak, they’re all different.

Here are five of the main types of plumbing water leaks and the type of plumbing leak detection devices that can be used for each of them. Please note – some types of leak detectors can be used on different types of plumbing water leak detection but we will give some for each…

1. Fresh Water Pipe Leaks – leaks in mains water feed to and in your property. Some of the tools used to find these types of leak include – moisture & damp meters helped by the use of pipe detectors.
2. Central Heating Leaks – leaks in your central heating pipes. Some of the methods used to find these include thermal imaging leak detection and tracer gas leak detection. You may suspect that you have a leak after seeing an F1 boiler error from boiler pressure loss – e.g. from a pressure relief valve problem or from a combi boiler leaking on the network of pipes linked the combi boiler.
3. Waste Water Pipe Leaks – sink waste pipe leaks, toilet leaks, shower waste leaks and leaks from washing machine and dishwasher wastes. Plumbing leak detection for these types of leak could include salts test analysis to understand the type of water source.
4. Cracked or corroded pipes – leaks caused by damage to copper water pipes, which can happen for different reasons. Finding these leaks could include acoustic leak detection.
5. High or low water pressure leaks – leaks caused by high pressure, or signified by low pressure. Finding these may involve using water meter reading and water pressure tests, or the use of a water flow meter device.

We have written another article on the top 5 things that leak water in your property that hold water and several of these are related to plumbing items around the home, including tanks, cylinders, tubs, pools etc. There is also an interesting article on when you get a shower leaking through ceiling, which is quite a common problem.

There are many different types of plumbing leak detection but hopefully these examples help to show some of the main ones and how they could be found. We are experienced in successfully finding all these types of water leaks. So if you have a leak, contact us for advice.

As you can see from the picture above, amongst other locations locally, one of the places we offer our service is leak detection in York.

Quite a few everyday plumbing items feather in our Slow Motion Water collection which is well worth a quick look, we are sure you will find them interesting. You may also be interested in our article about isolation valves used in plumbing or our guide to loft tank leaks.