Water leak detection in Whittier

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.

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.

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.

$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.