Leak & Pipe Repair
Most of a leak job is finding the leak. We trace it back to the pipe actually causing it, replace what failed, and test the run with the water on before anything gets closed up.
Finding It
A puddle under a sink tells you where to look. The costly ones never do that.
A joint weeping inside a wall, a fitting sweating above a finished ceiling — none of it drips where you'd look. It soaks into framing and subfloor for months, and by the time the ceiling goes soft the plumbing is the small part of the bill. Water travels, too: along a joist, down the outside of a pipe, out through a nail hole a fair distance from the split feeding it. "It's leaking right here" is a place to start, not the answer.
Worth Paying Attention To
You painted it and months later it's back, same shape, slightly bigger. Paint covers a stain and does nothing to the water making one.
A spare bedroom, a back closet. Damp framing smells wrong long before it looks wrong. If a closed-up room smells like a cellar, open the cupboards.
Same people, same showers, and the water use climbed anyway. On town water, an unexplained jump is often the first hard evidence you get.
Shut every tap, stop the washer, stand still. A faint steady hiss means water is moving and nothing in the house is asking it to.
Most homes here are on a well, so there's no meter — the pump is the meter. If it kicks in when nobody has drawn a drop, the system is losing pressure somewhere. See pumps & wells.
A strip of lawn between the well and the house that's greener, or still spongy when everything around it has dried. Buried lines leak quietly for a long time.
Confirming a hidden leak is mostly elimination — close valves one at a time and watch what the pressure does. On a well system the gauge at the pressure tank does the work: shut the valve feeding the house, note the pressure, come back in an hour. If it dropped, the water is going somewhere past that valve.
The Winter Problem
Water is one of the few things that gets bigger when it freezes — about a tenth again its own volume. A closed pipe can't give it that room.
The ice usually doesn't split the pipe where it sits. The plug grows along the line, pushing water ahead of it toward a closed tap; that trapped column has nowhere to go, so pressure climbs until the weakest point lets go — often well past the ice, somewhere that never froze at all.
And you rarely find out at the time. While everything is frozen the ice is its own plug, so a pipe can be split wide open and bone dry. It's the thaw that floods the house. A line that froze and then "came back fine" is worth a look rather than an assumption.
The most common one by a distance. A gap in the skirting, a torn vapour barrier, and wind off the water running under the floor all winter.
A run stapled to the cold side of the insulation. The kitchen sink on an exterior wall is the classic — cupboard doors shut, no heat reaching it.
Shut off is not the same as drained. One low spot holding a mouthful of water will split a line, and an empty trap does its own damage.
Anything built on later and heated differently, or not at all, with a line run through it to a laundry tub or an outside tap.
Frozen & Burst
A frozen pipe and a burst pipe are often the same event a few hours apart. Which one you have decides what to do in the next ten minutes.
The cheapest work anyone does on frozen pipes is done in October — insulating the exposed run, closing the gap where the wind gets in, putting heat on the length that gives trouble every year. If a line froze last winter it will freeze again; nothing about its situation changed on its own.
The most useful item costs nothing: find your main shut-off now. Turn it once so you know it moves, and make sure everyone in the house knows where it is — usually at the pressure tank on a well, or where the line comes through the basement wall on town water. Two in the morning with water coming through a light fixture is a poor time to start hunting for it.
Turn the main off before you put any heat near that pipe. You can't tell from outside whether the line under the ice is sound or already split. If it has split, the ice is the only thing holding the water back — and warming it is exactly what starts the flood.
First, every time, before anything else happens.
Gives meltwater and pressure somewhere to escape, and tells you the moment flow returns.
A hair dryer, a heat lamp, or cloths soaked in hot water. Working from the tap toward the ice lets melt run out instead of collecting behind the plug.
It's a straightforward way to set a wall on fire, and on copper it can flash trapped water to steam and split the pipe while you're holding it.
Inside a wall, under a floor, or you can't find the freeze. Stop guessing there.
Main off. Cut the power at the breaker to anything the water is reaching, and stay out of standing water if you can't isolate it. Open the lowest taps so what's still in the lines drains down instead of into the room. Then call — that's an emergency call-out. If you can do it safely, photograph the room before you start mopping; insurance will ask.
A freeze split isn't a pinhole. It's usually a slit running lengthwise along the pipe, an inch or more, where the metal stretched and tore. Nothing seals that — the damaged length comes out and new pipe goes in.
We don't assume there's only one, either. Ice forms along a run rather than at a point, so a line that split in one place has often been stressed in several. Once the new section is in, the pressure goes back up and we go over the whole run before calling it done. Then the part that matters more than the repair: why it froze there. Putting identical pipe back in the same cold spot just books next February's call.
Materials
Four materials cover nearly everything we find behind a wall around here. Each fails in its own way, and each is fixed differently.
Supply · older homes
Rigid and long-lived. It fails as pinholes — water chemistry thinning the wall from inside, often at elbows where the flow changes direction. Cut the bad length out and solder in new, or use press and compression fittings where there's no room for a torch.
Supply · newer & retrofit
Flexible tubing in long continuous lengths, so far fewer joints buried where you can't see them. It survives a freeze better than copper because it can stretch a little — better, not immune, and fittings still let go. Much easier to run through a finished house.
Drain, waste & vent
The black plastic. It carries no pressure, so it fails differently: a cracked fitting, a joint never solvent-welded properly, or a length sagging out of its hangers and holding water. Repairs are cut and glue — the awkward part is access.
Supply · oldest houses
Grey threaded pipe, the oldest thing still in service. It rusts closed from the inside, so the first symptom is pressure falling off rather than water appearing. Find it in a wall and we'll say plainly that patching one section is money spent on the oldest part of the system.
Which raises re-piping. If a run has failed twice, the third repair is rarely the last — that pipe is telling you what the rest of it intends to do. Replacing a whole section, valve to fixture, costs more on the day and usually less across five years. We'll tell you which side of that line you're on.
Shut-Offs
Every plan for a plumbing emergency ends with "and then I'd shut the water off" — a plan resting entirely on hardware most people have never touched.
A shut-off that has sat in one position since the house was built isn't one to count on. Turn your main closed and open again once a year just to prove it still works. If it fights you, that's the job — and a far better one to book in October than to discover in February.
The round-handle kind, several turns to close. Left untouched for decades the stem corrodes and the gate seizes — or drops off the stem, so the handle spins freely and nothing happens at the pipe. The worst version half-closes and won't open again.
A lever, ninety degrees, open to shut. Much less inside to seize, and you can read it across a dark basement: handle in line with the pipe means open, across means closed. This is what we put back in.
The small shut-offs under a sink and behind the toilet. When they work, a running toilet is a short job with the rest of the house still in water. When they've seized, everything gets shut down to change a washer.
An ordinary outside tap holds water right at the wall, which is where it freezes. A frost-free bib puts the valve seat back inside the heated part of the house on a long stem, and the barrel drains out the spout — which only works with the hose off. Leave one connected and the water stays trapped, defeating the design.
Valve work is the least interesting thing on this page and the most likely to save your floors. Rarely worth a call on its own — well worth adding to a visit that's already happening, while the line is drained anyway.
How It Goes
No mystery to it. Here's the shape of a normal leak call.
What's leaking, roughly where, and whether the water is off. If it's running into the house as we speak, we'll treat it as an emergency rather than a booking.
We start where the water shows and work back — sometimes a minute's work, sometimes isolating sections and watching the pressure until the line gives itself away.
The smallest opening that still lets the work be done properly. One tidy access cut beats three exploratory ones.
You get the number and agree to it before work starts. If what's behind the wall changes the job, we stop and tell you then — not by adding a line at the end.
New pipe, new fittings, and any tired valve on that run swapped while it's open. Then water on, pressure up, every joint checked while you're standing there. Nothing closes up until it's dry.
What failed, why, and whether anything else on that run is heading the same direction.
On access cuts: we leave the opening square and ready for patching, and we'll tell you before we cut, not after.
Related
A pipe that has already let go, water through a ceiling, or a basement filling up. Don't work through this page — call.
Learn moreWater under the tank isn't always the tank. Fittings, the drain valve and the relief-valve discharge all leak — and those are repairs.
Learn moreSome drips are past rebuilding. Once a tap has been apart twice, a new fixture with fresh stops beneath it is the better spend.
Learn moreEverything else we take on is on the services page — or just get in touch and describe what the water is doing.
Ready When You Are
Tell us what you're seeing — a stain, a sound, a pipe that froze last night — and we'll work out what's behind it. You'll get a straight answer on cost and timing before anything starts.
506-321-6782Mon–Fri 8:00am–5:00pm · emergency call-outs by arrangement