Leak Detection in Hollywell

Every leak job starts at the meter. Everything off, note the reading, wait 30 minutes to 2 hours, read again. On a canal block the second step is where we diverge from the standard suburban approach, and it is the step that saves the most time.

Isolate the outdoor scope before you touch the house. Close the isolators on the irrigation, the pool top-up, the pontoon supply and any outdoor kitchen or shower branch, then re-read the meter. If it stops, we have cut the search area in half in about ten minutes, and on waterfront properties it stops more often than owners expect. The outdoor network on a canal home is the least maintained and most frequently damaged pipework on the block.

The usual suspects out there:

• A pool auto-fill valve that has stopped seating. It runs continuously into the pool and reads on the meter exactly like a leak. The pool level looks fine, because the valve is doing its job to excess. Cheap to fix, easy to miss, and a common cause of a bill jump on canal homes.
• An irrigation solenoid not closing fully. Same pattern, only the water goes into the garden and disappears into ground that was already damp.
• The buried run out to the pontoon. Long, exposed to the most corrosive conditions on the property, and often installed at a different time to the rest of the house by whoever built the jetty. Damage from landscaping and impact at the tap is common.
• Landscaping strikes. Irrigation and supply lines nicked by a spade, a post hole or a machine during a garden rebuild, then buried again. The leak starts small and gets worse.

Reading the ground, and why we mostly do not. Damp that comes and goes on a roughly twice-daily rhythm is tidal groundwater, not plumbing. A leak does not keep tide hours. It runs at the same rate at 3am on a spring low as it does at midday, so consistency over time is the only surface signal worth anything. If someone tells you they found your leak by looking at a wet patch near a revetment wall, be sceptical.

Then the house side. Once the outdoor branches are cleared it is the standard sequence done properly: isolate at the house entry, pressure test hot and cold separately, locate the pipe routes, then pinpoint with acoustic ground microphones and thermal imaging where a hot line is involved. Most canal homes are 15 to 30 years old and slab on ground, so in-slab hot water lines are a genuine possibility worth testing rather than assuming.

Why detection is cheap on a premium home. The plumbing repair is rarely the expensive part of a waterfront leak. Stone, engineered timber and built-in joinery are what water destroys, and they cost multiples of the pipe repair to put right. Pinpointing before anything is opened, and stopping the leak days earlier, is where the real money is saved. We are QBCC licensed for plumbing (licence 15243081) and repair what we find the same visit where the break is accessible.

Non-invasive leak detection is $200 to $500 or more. Canal properties tend to sit in the middle to upper part of that range simply because there is more pipe to work through. A large block with irrigation, a pool top-up line, an outdoor kitchen and a buried pontoon supply has several separate networks to isolate and test before the house pipework is even reached.

Pool leak detection is a separate scope at $300 to $600 or more, and there is a free check worth doing first. The bucket test tells you whether the pool is actually losing water beyond normal evaporation, and it costs nothing. Repairs are quoted as a fixed price in writing after detection, typically $250 to $650 plus parts for an accessible break and $1,500 to $4,000 or more through a slab. Buried external and pontoon supply repairs are quoted on inspection because dig access varies enormously from one waterfront block to the next.