Leak Detection and Repair in Colorado Springs, CO

Finding it before opening anything

The point of leak detection is to keep the hole in your house small. We start at the meter, isolate the building and watch whether the loss continues, which tells us whether the water is escaping inside or out on the service line. From there we use acoustic listening equipment, which picks up the specific hiss a pressurized line makes as it escapes, along with pressure testing on isolated sections and thermal imaging where a hot line is involved. Under a slab, a hot water leak often shows as a warm stripe across the floor long before anything looks wet.

What we open, and how it goes back

Once the leak is marked you get a flat price that covers getting to the pipe, making the repair and leaving the surface ready for patching. We cut the access opening square and we keep it as small as the repair allows. Drop cloths go down, dust gets contained and the debris leaves with us.

Materials and repair choices

The right repair depends on what the existing pipe is. Copper gets a soldered or press fitting in copper. PEX runs get a proper crimped or expansion fitting and a support where it passes a framing member. We do not mix a patchwork of fittings and push connectors inside a wall where nobody can ever inspect them. Where an old galvanized section has failed, a single patch is usually a false economy, because the rest of that run is the same age and the same thickness. In mid century homes around Fountain and Security-Widefield we will often quote replacing the whole run in copper or PEX alongside the spot fix, so you can choose.

Pressure, altitude and the freeze pattern here

High incoming pressure is a quiet cause of pinholes and fitting failures. If your static pressure is up above the normal working range, a pressure reducing valve protects every joint, every appliance hose and every toilet fill valve in the house. We gauge it on the first visit.

Our freeze calls follow a pattern. A warm sunny afternoon drops to a hard overnight low, and the lines that fail are the ones that had no protection against a sudden swing: hose bibs with a hose still attached, supply runs in a vented crawlspace, and pipe chased through an exterior wall in an older house. Manitou Springs and the Old North End see plenty of that. Insulating those runs, closing crawlspace vents for the winter and pulling hoses off in October prevents most of it.

After the repair

We bring the system back up, hold pressure on it and check the joint again once it has been under load for a while. Then we look at the area around the leak to make sure it is drying rather than holding water. If there is enough moisture in the structure to need drying equipment, we will tell you straight away so your insurer hears about it early.