HOW PLUMBERS DO LEAK DETECTION

plumbing pipe leaksLeaks are one of the most persistent, and difficult to locate, troubles that can afflict your home’s plumbing. Leaks as small as pinholes can cause serious problems for pipes and building material, leading to elevated water bills, reduced water pressure, mildew growth, and structural damage.

Locating a leak is often more difficult than fixing it, and to help you with this job you will need a trained, experienced plumber with the necessary equipment to zero in on where leaks are occurring behind walls and under floors.

Before You Call a Plumber

When you’re dealing with a hidden leak, there are a few things you may want to try before calling your plumbers at BZ Dependable.

Check the Meter

The easiest means of detecting a hidden plumbing leak if you suspect one is to check your meter, then shut off all the water in your home – or even just refrain from using any water for any reason in your home – for a few hours and check the meter again. If it’s gone up, then you’ve used water and there’s a leak somewhere.

Get an Automatic Shut-Off Valve

An automatic shut-off valve does more than just detect the presence of a leak. When water flow exceeds a certain amount – in other words, when a leak appears – it automatically shuts off water to your whole home. This can be a mild nuisance, but it also alerts you to the problem immediately. More importantly, it limits the damage the leak can cause, ensuring that the repair cost doesn’t get out of hand while you summon a plumber to help.

Look for Mold and Mildew

Pinhole leaks and other small leaks can result in the growth of mold and bacteria, which give off a terrible smell, and can create soft spots in wood or other furnishings. This usually appears only after the leak has had time to do damage.

When You Need Professional Leak Detection

For excellent leak detection in Tenafly, NJ, look to BZ Dependable Plumbing & Heating, Inc. and our certified professional plumbers.

The tools of leak detection

Sometimes plumbers can locate leaks visually through clues, such as cracks, damp spots on walls, floorboard warping, or spots of mildew.

The majority of the time, however, they need to use listening equipment that can penetrate through material such as wood and stone to pick up the tiniest sounds of dripping water or changes in water pressure. A leak will make noise, even if it’s a small leak! With the right equipment and the skills to use it, a plumber can pinpoint a leak to a tiny area so that the minimal amount of digging, drilling, or disruption is necessary to access the leak and fix it.

Another tool that assists with leak detection is infrared sensors, which can pick up excess moisture in hidden areas. Infrared scanning detects areas of moisture by registering temperature. Areas that are wet will be cooler and will appear as such on the infrared scan.

Plumbers also use video pipe inspection equipment to look down into pipes where they suspect there may be leaks. This type of tool is a long, snaking cable that has a camera on the end of it that sends back real-time video images of the inside of the pipes. This allows the plumber to see exactly how bad the leak is and where it is located.

The combination of listening equipment, infrared sensors, and video pipe inspection cameras allows skilled plumbers to not only find leaks with precision, but to use the data to deduce the reason the leaking started. Fixing a leak is also about fixing what caused it in the first place.

Trust to professionals in leak detection

Consumers can purchase some high-end leak detection equipment through online retailers. However, the tools come with a large price tag and require special training to use and interpret their readings. But even if you could find these leaks on your own, the work needed to expose the leak and fix it is not the work for a hobbyist. Make the job easy for you and your plumbing: call up certified professional plumbers who have the right tools.

When you hire the experts at BZ Dependable Plumbing & Heating, Inc., for leak detection, they bring years of experience, coupled with the latest tools, to every job. This means our plumbing specialists will find your leak(s), assess what has to be fixed and repair the problems in a timely, efficient manner with as little intrusion as possible.

BZ Dependable Plumbing & Heating has a staff of plumbers to help you with leak detection in Tenafly, NJ. Let us stop those leaks in your home’s plumbing before they turn into major problems.

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