Leak Detection Calgary — Find It Before You Open the Wall

Use your meter — it settles the question for free.

Turn off every fixture and appliance that uses water, then find your water meter and look for the small low-flow indicator, usually a triangle, star or tiny dial. Note the reading. Come back in thirty to sixty minutes.

If the reading has moved or the indicator is turning, water is leaving the system. If nothing has changed, you don't have a supply-side leak.

Before you go further, rule out the toilets: a few drops of food colouring in the tank, don't flush, check the bowl fifteen minutes later. Colour in the bowl means the flapper is passing water, and that is by far the most common silent leak in any house.

That's the classic hidden leak presentation, and the meter test is the first step.

If the meter confirms a leak, the next question is inside or outside. Close the main shutoff where the supply enters the house and watch the meter again — if it keeps moving with the house isolated, the leak is on the service line between meter and building. If it stops, it's inside.

From there we locate acoustically and thermally rather than opening walls to look. Common culprits in Calgary: a Poly-B fitting inside a wall, a pinhole in galvanized supply, or an outdoor tap that split over winter and only leaks when it's opened in spring.

Usually a small, deliberate section — and only after we know where the leak is.

The point of acoustic listening and thermal imaging is to narrow the location before anything is opened. Exploratory demolition is what turns a modest repair into a drywall and paint job, and it's avoidable in most cases.

In a heritage home with original plaster and lath, this matters more than convenience — that finish doesn't go back the way it came out. We'll always tell you what we've established and how confident we are before anything gets cut.

Yes, and thermal imaging is genuinely effective on heated slabs because a leaking in-floor loop shows as a temperature anomaly.

Worth setting expectations though: most Calgary homes have basements rather than slab-on-grade construction, so the classic under-slab supply leak that dominates American plumbing content is much less common here than search results suggest.

Where we do see slab work is in-floor radiant heating loops, which is specialist hydronic territory. See in-floor heating.

Almost certainly, because a sealed heating system shouldn't lose water at all.

If you're topping the pressure up repeatedly, that water is going somewhere — a fitting, a valve, an expansion vessel that has failed, or a loop in the floor. Some of it evaporates off a warm pipe before it ever shows as a puddle, which is why it can run for a long time unnoticed.

Our guide on why boilers lose pressure covers the causes, and boiler repair covers the fix.

It depends on how accessible the suspect area is and how much of the system has to be isolated to narrow it down — and we won't quote it sight-unseen.

What we can tell you is the shape of it: locating is quoted separately from repairing, because until we know where the leak is nobody can price the repair honestly. Anyone quoting a repair before locating the leak is guessing.

Start with the free meter test. If it shows nothing, you've saved yourself a call. If it shows something, we'll come out and give you the location and the repair scope in writing.

We'll find one and tell you exactly what and where it is. We don't repair them.

Structural sewer work — lining or excavating a failed lateral — is specialist excavation and it isn't a trade we take on. What we do is the diagnostic half: camera inspection, locating the damage and its depth, and a written description of what we found.

Take that to a sewer specialist and they can quote from real evidence rather than re-running the diagnosis at your expense. For everything on the supply side, and for drain clearing short of structural failure, we're the call. See drain cleaning.

Same day for an active leak — water running where you can see it, a ceiling coming down, anything getting worse by the hour.

Before we arrive: shut the water off at the main if you can, and stay out of any water near electrical outlets or the panel.

For a suspected hidden leak with nothing visibly wet, it's usually worth doing the meter test first — it tells us a great deal before we arrive and occasionally saves you the visit entirely. A real person answers at 587-834-3668.