Water Leak Detection

A hidden water leak rarely stays small. The Association of British Insurers has reported that escape of water claims cost insurers around £1.8 million every day, and most of those claims started life as a quiet drip behind a wall or under a floor. After more than 30 years finding leaks across Cornwall and Devon, we have watched plenty of “it’s probably nothing” jobs turn into insurance claims because the leak ran on for months.

Our job is to find yours before that happens. We locate the leak first, with no destructive searching, so any repair opens up one small, precise area instead of half a room. No call-out fees, a fixed price agreed up front, and No Find, No Fee on residential leak detection (subject to terms).

💧 Why a hidden leak costs more than you think

Escape of water is one of the most common and most expensive types of home insurance claim in the UK, which is why the ABI ran a national campaign about it. The damage builds quietly: water tracks along joists and cable runs, soaks into plaster and screed, and shows up somewhere completely different from the leak itself.

The waste adds up fast too. Waterwise, the UK water efficiency body, estimates that a single leaking toilet can waste 215 to 400 litres of water a day. On a metered supply, that is your money running down the drain. Left damp, the building itself starts to suffer: guidance from the US Environmental Protection Agency notes that mould can begin growing on wet materials within 24 to 48 hours.

The earlier a leak is found, the smaller the access hole, the shorter the drying time and the simpler the insurance claim. That is the whole case for professional water leak detection: pay once to find it precisely, rather than paying repeatedly to repair the damage it keeps causing.

🔍 Our water leak detection process, step by step

Finding a water leak is a process of elimination, done with the right tools in the right order. Every survey follows the same structure, whether it is a cottage bathroom or commercial leak detection across a larger site.

We never start by opening anything up. The kit does the searching, and your property stays intact while it does.

🏠 Types of water leaks we find

Different leaks call for different methods, which is why we carry the full toolkit to every job. These are the ones we see most across Cornwall and Devon:

If the wet patch is outside, our guide on how to find a water leak underground covers what you can check yourself before calling anyone. And if the meter keeps turning with everything in the house switched off, you may have a leak between the meter and your house. Ofwat and South West Water both confirm that this stretch of supply pipe is normally the property owner’s responsibility, not the water company’s, so it pays to find it early.

🛠️ The technology behind non-invasive leak detection

Nobody should be digging up a garden or lifting a floor on a hunch. Each of our methods has its own strengths, and we choose the combination that suits your leak:

Acoustic listening and leak correlators

Water escaping from a pressurised pipe makes a distinctive noise. Ground microphones and listening sticks amplify that sound through solid floors and hard landscaping. On longer pipe runs we use leak correlators: two sensors are placed on the pipe and the equipment calculates the leak position from the time the noise takes to reach each one. Read more about our acoustic leak detection service.

Thermal imaging cameras

Our FLIR cameras read surface temperature differences that escaping water creates, so a warm heating leak under a tiled floor shows up on screen without a single tile being lifted. See how thermal imaging leak detection works in practice.

Tracer gas

For the leaks nothing else can pin down, we drain the pipe and charge it with the industry standard tracer gas, a mix of 5 per cent hydrogen in 95 per cent nitrogen. The mix is non flammable and safe in use, and the hydrogen molecules are small enough to escape through the leak and rise through soil, screed or concrete, where a sensitive detector picks them up at the surface. Our tracer gas leak detection page explains the method in full.

Moisture meters and mapping

Damp readings taken across walls and floors let us trace the water’s path back to its source, so we treat the cause rather than the symptom. The same readings go into your report as evidence for an insurance claim.

🌊 Built for Cornwall and Devon properties

This is our patch, and it has its own leak problems. Salt-laden coastal air speeds up corrosion of exposed metal pipework and fittings, which is one reason seaside properties from Penzance to Ilfracombe see pipe failures that inland homes escape. Much of the region’s housing stock is also older: granite, cob and stone properties built long before modern plastic plumbing, many still carrying original iron or copper runs buried in solid floors.

Add long rural supply pipes crossing fields and driveways, and you have leaks that are genuinely hard to find without the right equipment. We are a local Cornwall business, not a franchise sent down from up country, so if you have been searching for water leak detection near me anywhere between Land’s End and the Devon border, the team that answers the phone is the team that turns up.

🛡️ Insurance claims and trace and access

Most UK buildings insurance policies include trace and access cover. In plain terms, it usually pays for professionally locating the leak and making good the damage caused by getting to it. It does not always cover repairing the faulty pipe itself, and policy limits vary, so check your own wording. Our guide to what trace and access cover is walks through it in plain English.

Because we work to insurer requirements, every detection survey can come with a report built for the claim: photographs of the leak location, thermal images, moisture readings and a description of the methods used. When you are ready to book, our trace and access service handles the detection and the documentation in one visit.

📋 What to expect and how to prepare

A leak detection survey is not disruptive, and a few minutes of preparation helps us work faster:

• Know where your stopcock is (usually under the kitchen sink, or where the supply enters the property)
• Dig out a recent water bill or two, since usage history helps us judge the size of the leak
• If you have a meter, learn how to read your water meter and note a reading last thing at night and first thing in the morning with no water used. Movement overnight points to a live leak
• Clear access to the areas where you have seen damp or heard water
• Note when you first spotted the problem and anything that changed around that time, such as building work or a cold snap

On the day, we test, listen, scan and mark the leak position, then talk you through exactly what we found and what should happen next. You are never left with a mystery invoice: the price is the one agreed before we arrived.