FAQ

$150 to $400 across the industry for residential leak detection, wider on a large lot, and the thing that moves it is the amount of ground that has to be searched rather than the time on site. There is no verified local average for this city and this site does not invent one. What you can do instead is better than an average: pace out the distance from your meter to your house, because that is the number the price actually follows, and ask anybody quoting you to explain theirs against it.

Read your meter. Turn off every tap and appliance in the house and switch off the irrigation controller, then look at the low-flow indicator -- the small dial or triangle that moves on the smallest flow. If it is turning, water is moving somewhere it should not be. If it is completely still across two readings an hour apart, you very probably do not have one. That is a real diagnostic, it takes ten minutes, and it costs nothing. It is also the reason this page exists before the price page does.

No, and this is worth knowing before you spend anything. A bill is a calculation from a reading, and readings can be wrong. Somebody in this area paid for a detection visit on the strength of a $1,700 bill, was told there were no leaks, and eventually established that a meter reading had been transcribed incorrectly -- a 2 recorded as a 5. Check the reading printed on your bill against the dials on your meter before you book anybody. If they do not match, your problem is administrative and nobody needs to dig.

Because finding it is the hard part. Once a leak is located to a spot, the repair is ordinary plumbing -- a cut, a fitting, a test -- at an ordinary price. Narrowing an entire property down to that spot is what takes the skill and the equipment, and on a buried line it can take hours. Somebody in this county summarised it exactly: an underground pipe repair cost them about $2,000, and the reason was that it had to be found first. Buying the locating properly is what keeps the repair small.

The meter is the boundary. Everything on the street side of it is the utility's; everything on the house side is the owner's, including the whole buried run up your drive. That matters more here than in most places because the lots vary so much -- a few yards on a tract frontage, a couple of hundred feet on an acre north of the city, and all of that length is yours. There is a free test for which side it is on: shut the valve at the house and leave the meter live. If the meter keeps turning, the loss is outside in your service line.

Not to locate a leak, anywhere in this service area. You do to open a slab or replace a section of service line, and the desk is not the same across the six places on this site. La Habra and Fullerton are Orange County cities and permit through their own departments. Whittier, La Mirada and La Habra Heights are Los Angeles County cities and do the same. Hacienda Heights is the one that catches people out: it is unincorporated, so it goes through Los Angeles County Public Works rather than through any city, on a different timetable.

No, and we do not sell one. A leak is an event rather than a condition with an interval -- there is nothing accumulating in a sound line between inspections, so an annual visit finds exactly what your meter would have told you for nothing. What is genuinely worth doing once is knowing where your shutoff is and how to read your own meter. Both are free and both are more use at two in the morning than any subscription.

Three things, none of which needs a professional. What your meter did with everything switched off. Roughly how far the meter is from the house, paced out. And the decade the house went up, because it decides whether the line is likely copper, galvanised or plastic, and each fails in a different place and is found a different way. With those three we can usually tell you on the phone what the visit will cost and, sometimes, that you do not need one.