Find it first. Then fix it.
Slab leaks, pinholes and pressure that disappears when somebody else turns a faucet on. The expensive part of a leak is not the repair, it is opening up the wrong wall to look for it.
THE TEST YOU CAN DO YOURSELF
Five minutes at the meter tells you a lot.
Before you call anybody, do this. It costs nothing and it turns a vague worry into a fact.
- Turn off every faucet in the house, inside and out. Make sure the dishwasher, the washing machine and any ice maker are not running, and nobody is about to flush anything.
- Find the meter box in the parkway or the front lawn and lift the lid.
- Look at the small triangular or star shaped dial on the face. That is the low flow indicator and it is sensitive enough to pick up a very small leak.
- Watch it for two minutes. If it is turning at all, water is moving somewhere in your system.
- Write down the full meter reading, leave the house untouched for an hour, and read it again.
If that dial is turning with everything off, you have a leak. If it is perfectly still, your high bill is coming from somewhere else, and that is genuinely useful to know before anybody starts cutting into things.
Bring that reading to the appointment. It saves Ron the first part of the diagnosis and it can take a chunk off the first hour.
SLAB LEAKS
Under a valley concrete pad, a leak hides.
Almost every home out here is slab on grade with the supply lines running through or under the concrete. There is no basement for a leak to drip into, so it announces itself in less obvious ways. These are the ones people actually notice.
A warm patch on the floor
Walk the house barefoot in the morning. A hot line leaking under the slab warms the concrete above it, and it will be noticeably warmer than the floor either side. This is the clearest single sign there is.
The water bill jumped and nothing changed
No new people, no new garden, same habits, much bigger bill. A slab leak runs continuously because nothing about it ever gets turned off.
The sound of running water with everything off
Usually at night when the house is quiet. Put an ear against the floor in a few places. It is a faint continuous hiss rather than a drip.
Pressure has dropped across the whole house
Not one fixture, all of them. If the shower went weak at the same time the kitchen did, the problem is upstream of both.
Damp carpet or lifting flooring with no source
Particularly along a wall, in a hallway, or at the edge of a room. Water travels along the top of the slab and comes up wherever it finds a way through.
The water heater runs constantly
If the leak is on the hot side, the heater is trying to keep an unlimited quantity of water warm. A heater that never seems to rest with nobody using hot water is worth investigating.
GALVANIZED, COPPER, PEX
What is in your walls, and how it fails.
Knowing what your house is piped in tells you what to expect. You can usually see it at the water heater or under a sink.
Galvanized steel, roughly pre 1970
Gray, threaded, and heavy. It rusts closed from the inside out, so the pipe narrows year on year. Symptoms are pressure that drops when a second faucet opens, brown water first thing, and eventually a pinhole at a threaded joint. There is no repairing a galvanized system, you can only replace sections of it, and each new section makes the next weak point fail sooner.
Copper, roughly 1960s to 2000s
Excellent pipe, and most of it will outlive all of us. Where it does fail it is pinholes, often on the hot side, caused by water chemistry, high velocity from excessive pressure, or a poorly soldered joint from decades ago. One pinhole is a repair. Three pinholes in two years is a system telling you something.
PEX, roughly 2000s onward
Flexible plastic, usually red and blue, common in the newer Mountain House, Lathrop and Manteca builds. Very reliable pipe. When there is a problem it is almost always a fitting rather than the tube, and the manifold system means a single run can be isolated without shutting the house down, which is a genuine advantage during a repair.
When repiping is the right call
Repiping a whole house is a big job and nobody should sell you one casually. It becomes the sensible option when you are on galvanized and the pressure has gone, when you are getting repeat pinholes in copper, or when you are already opening walls for a remodel and the pipe in them is at the end of its life. Any other time, repair the leak.
PRESSURE
Too much is worse than too little.
Household plumbing is generally designed around 40 to 60 psi. Some of the newer developments out here come in a good deal higher than that, and homeowners often think of high pressure as a bonus.
It is not. Everything downstream is rated for a range, and above it, things fail early and repeatedly. Toilet fill valves that will not stop running. Braided supply hoses that split behind a washing machine. Faucet cartridges that start dripping a year after they were fitted. Water heaters whose relief valves weep. Each of those looks like an isolated failure. Together they are one problem wearing six costumes.
A pressure regulator is not an expensive part and fitting it is not a long job. If you are replacing a fill valve for the second time in two years, it is worth having the pressure tested before you replace a third.
Have the pressure checked, freeLeak and repipe questions
Meter dial turning with everything off?
That is a leak, and it is running right now. Book the free consultation and Ron will find out where it is before anything gets cut.