Water Leak Detection in East London

Signs you may have a hidden leak

Leaks aren't always obvious. Watch for a water bill that has crept up for no reason, damp patches or staining on walls, ceilings or floors, a musty smell, the sound of running water when everything is off, or a boiler that keeps losing pressure. Any of these is worth a look before it becomes a bigger problem.

Finding the leak without tearing your home apart

We locate leaks using careful, non-invasive methods rather than guesswork — so we don't rip up floors and walls just to take a look. Once we've pinpointed the source, we explain exactly what's causing it and the best way to put it right.

Repairs done properly

From a dripping joint to a leaking underground supply pipe, we carry out a clean, lasting repair and check the surrounding pipework so the same issue doesn't return. We cover East London and Essex, and we're happy to give you a free quotation first.

How we actually locate a hidden leak

Two methods do most of the work, and they answer different questions. Acoustic detection listens for the sound a pressurised leak makes as water escapes through a small opening — a distinctive hiss that carries along the pipe and through the structure, which lets us trace it back to a point rather than a general area. Thermal imaging reads surface temperature instead, which is what finds a leak on a hot feed or a heating pipe under a floor, where the escaping water warms the covering above it in a pattern you can see but not feel. Where the picture is still ambiguous we isolate sections and pressure test them one at a time, which narrows it down by elimination. The point of all three is the same: open up one small area you are confident about, rather than three you are guessing at.

The leaks that hide the longest

The worst leaks are not dramatic. A slow weep on a joint buried in a wall or under a floor can run for months, doing steady damage to plaster, joists and insulation while showing nothing more than a faint smell and a slightly higher bill. Underground supply pipe leaks between the boundary stopcock and the house are the same — the water simply soaks away into the ground, so nothing appears indoors at all until the pressure drops noticeably or the bill arrives. A boiler or heating system losing pressure repeatedly is a third: if you are topping up the filling loop every few weeks, water is leaving the system somewhere, and it usually surfaces as a hairline weep on a radiator valve, a corroded fitting under a floor, or a failing pressure relief valve discharging outside where nobody looks.

Reading your water meter to check for a leak

There is a simple test worth doing before you call anybody. Turn off every tap and appliance in the house, then read your water meter and write the number down. Leave it two or three hours with nothing at all being used and read it again. If it has moved, water is going somewhere it should not — and the size of the movement gives a rough idea of the scale. If it has not moved, the problem is more likely to be on the heating side, which is a closed system and will not show on the meter. Either result is genuinely useful to us before we arrive, and it costs you nothing but a few hours of not running a tap.

Leak work we cover

• ✓Acoustic leak detection
• ✓Thermal imaging surveys
• ✓Hidden and under-floor leaks
• ✓Water supply pipe repairs
• ✓Burst pipe repair
• ✓Boiler and radiator leaks
• ✓Leaking taps, valves and joints
• ✓Pressure testing after repair