Leak detection is all we do

A general plumber faced with a leak they cannot see has one option: start opening things up until water appears. We start the other way round. Thermal imaging shows where heat is escaping, acoustic listening picks up the hiss of pressurised water through a floor, and tracer gas finds its way out of the smallest split in a pipe under a screed or a driveway. By the time anything is opened, we already know what is behind it.

Most surveys use two or three methods, because each has blind spots. A thermal camera is superb on a heating pipe and useless on a cold mains leak; tracer gas is the reverse. The kit we carry covers the whole range: a handheld thermal imaging camera, a Sewerin Aquaphon acoustic ground microphone, a Sewerin Variotec tracer gas detector, a borescope camera for voids and ceilings, nitrogen pressure test gauges, and dye and water test strips to tell mains, heating and waste water apart.

We repair what we find, so there is no second contractor to brief and no second visit to wait for. Where a floor or a wall has to be opened to reach the pipe, we keep it to the size of the repair and photograph everything before and after.

Every job ends with a written report: the symptoms you described, the tests we ran, the readings, the photographs and thermal images, and where the leak was. If you are claiming on your buildings insurance, that report is what the loss adjuster needs.