This page is about finding a leak. Fixing one is separate work, and we do that too, but the finding comes first and it is the part people get wrong. Homeowners rip out drywall where the stain is, and the stain is almost never where the leak is. Water runs along the top of a joist or the underside of a slab and comes out at the lowest low point it can reach, sometimes rooms away.

Nearly every house around here sits on a slab on grade. The supply lines run under that concrete. There is nothing to see and nothing to open up, which is why detection is done with sound and pressure instead of eyes. Pressurized water escaping a pinhole makes a specific noise through concrete, and acoustic gear picks it up and lets us narrow it to a spot rather than a room.

We also test rather than assume. Isolating sections of the system and watching what the meter does tells us whether the loss is on the supply side, at an irrigation zone, or a toilet flapper that has been running quietly since March. Plenty of mystery bills turn out to be the cheapest possible fix, and we would rather tell you that than start cutting.

Copper under concrete fails from the outside in as often as the inside out. Soil chemistry, stray current, and simple abrasion where the pipe rubs against concrete every time it expands with hot water all thin the wall until a pinhole opens. Hot lines go first more often than cold, because they move more with every heating cycle. That is why a warm spot on a floor is such a useful clue.

The other common source is a fitting that was never quite right at construction. A joint that was slightly stressed when the slab was poured can hold fine for a decade and then start weeping. Once it starts, the escaping water erodes soil under the slab, and you get a small void long before you get a visible symptom inside the house.

Irrigation and pool lines confuse the picture locally. A lot of properties from Freeport out to Santa Rosa Beach have both, often on the same meter, and a cracked lateral out in the yard reads on the bill exactly like a slab leak reads. Testing sections separately is what tells those apart, and it saves people from paying to open a floor over a broken sprinkler line.