What Are the Signs of a Slab Leak?

• A water bill that climbs with no change in how you use water. A slab leak runs all day and all night, and the meter counts every drop of it.
• Running water you can hear with everything off. Water escaping a pressurized line under the slab makes noise, and a quiet house at night is when it's easiest to hear.
• A warm spot on the floor. When the leak is on a hot water line, hot water soaks into the concrete and warms the floor above it. Bare feet on tile or hardwood tend to find it first.
• Damp carpet or flooring with no spill to explain it. Water coming up from below has to go somewhere, and the flooring is the first thing it reaches.
• A mildew smell you can't trace. Moisture trapped under carpet pad or flooring grows mildew before any water shows.
• Low water pressure. Water that leaks out of the line on the way to a fixture never arrives at the fixture.

The meter test costs nothing and settles a lot. Turn off every faucet, shower and appliance that uses water, including sprinklers and the ice maker, and make sure nobody in the house runs anything. Then look at the water meter. If the dial or the small leak indicator is still moving with everything off, water is going somewhere it shouldn't.

A moving meter doesn't tell you where the leak is. It could be under the slab, in the yard line, or a toilet quietly running. It tells you the water is leaving, and whether the meter moves with everything off is one of the first things Jordan asks when you call.

Don't start breaking up the floor to look. Concrete is expensive to open and expensive to patch, and water under a slab can travel before it shows, so the wet spot isn't always where the leak is.

Call Jordan instead and describe what you're seeing: the bill, the sounds, the wet or warm spots, and what the meter did. Those answers narrow the search before he arrives. On site, pressure testing isolates the line that's losing water and electronic detection equipment locates the leak on it, so the repair is a small opening in a known spot. How that non-destructive search works walks through each step, and what leak detection costs covers the price and the fee credit.

Waiting doesn't make a slab leak cheaper, because the water keeps running either way. Leak detection is the reason most people call Platinum Pipe Solutions, and Jordan has 15+ years of it. More on slab leak detection and repair is on the service page.