Buried Supply Lines
The run from the boundary meter up to the house, under lawns, paving and driveways. Where most traces end up, and where a leak can run unnoticed for the longest.
Home / Leak Detection
Leak detection in Ballito starts at your meter rather than in your garden, because a two minute test proves whether there is anything to find. We trace the line acoustically, mark the leak, and open one spot. Detection and repair are quoted separately. If water is running now, go to emergency plumbing.
Please run the meter check before sending this. Shut everything off, give it two minutes, and note what the dial did. Tell us what it did and the answer you get back will be far more useful.
Water disappearing with no visible source is a solvable problem rather than a mystery. Swimming pools run on an entirely different set of tests and are dealt with separately on the pool leak detection page.
The run from the boundary meter up to the house, under lawns, paving and driveways. Where most traces end up, and where a leak can run unnoticed for the longest.
Microphones follow the pipe run and a thermal camera reads the heat signature underfoot, narrowing it enough that a patch of screed is lifted rather than a floor.
Damp patterns that do not match how the room is ventilated, isolated with a pressure test that proves which circuit is actually losing water.
An inlet valve that no longer seats sends a thin continuous stream into the bowl around the clock. Nothing overflows and nothing is audible. Cheap to fix, costly to leave.
An overflow discharging quietly onto a bed. Your meter records this as lost water, but what it is really reporting is a geyser that has started to fail.
Images taken at the moment of exposure, the location logged, and a bill broken into its parts. Assessors and billing departments both ask for precisely this and are rarely given it.
Almost everywhere else in South Africa, a water bill that has climbed for no obvious reason comes with a ready-made external suspect. Nationally, non-revenue water runs at about 47 percent. Nearly half of everything pumped never reaches a paying meter, lost to leaks in the ground, faulty metering and theft. In several metros the figure is worse than that and still climbing.
Ballito is not one of those places, and that turns out to matter a great deal when you are trying to work out where your money is going. Water here has been run since 1999 by Siza Water, a private thirty year concession operating under contract to the iLembe District Municipality, and it reports losses of between 15 and 20 percent. The global average is 37. This network sits inside international best practice, and it is not an accident: the same operator runs one of the country's largest direct reuse plants, recovering up to three million litres of potable quality water a day.
Draw the obvious conclusion. If the pipe in the road is losing very little, and your bill has moved by a third with nothing changed indoors, then the water is going somewhere on your side of the connection. The comfortable explanation that everyone else in the country gets to reach for, that the utility is haemorrhaging it upstream, is simply not available here. The arithmetic points at your property, and it points there quite firmly.
That is why the meter test comes before the invoice. Every tap shut, every toilet settled, then two minutes watching the dial. A meter that keeps turning with nothing running is proof, and it converts a vague anxiety about a bill into a defined job with a boundary around it. A meter that sits perfectly still tells you something equally valuable, which is that you have a billing question and not a plumbing one, and that nobody needs to come out at all.
One thing you will never get from us is a tempting figure for attending followed by a much larger one for the actual search, produced at the point where you are least able to walk away from it. The detection price is the detection price. The repair is a separate figure, quoted once we can see what broke, and agreed by you before anyone starts on it.
Do this first. Costs nothing, and it alters what you actually need us for.
Four steps, and the price is fixed at the first one.
We confirm there is a loss before charging anybody to go looking for one.
Valves closed one by one until the losing branch reveals itself, then microphones and a thermal camera along that branch alone.
A painted cross you have looked at and approved, then a single opening in the ground.
The figure quoted for searching is the figure charged for searching, whatever the search turns into.
Cost, the boundary at the meter, and telling a leak from a billing estimate.
Detection and repair are two different jobs and they are priced as two different jobs. You get the detection figure before anyone arrives, and the repair is quoted only once we know what is actually broken. The price does not climb because the trace turned out to be difficult, and it does not climb once we are already standing in your garden. Two separate supply lines, or a property with no working isolators, both make the search longer. Either one is flagged to you while you are still deciding.
No. A deposit taken before anybody has established what the job is turns a diagnosis into a purchase, and it is the most common complaint in this trade. If you describe a damp patch and it turns out to be rising damp, a failed shower seal or a roof problem, that is not a leak and we will tell you so at no cost. Paying to find out you needed a different trade entirely is not something we will put you through.
Close every tap in the house and make sure no toilet is filling. Now lift the lid on the meter box out at your boundary and give the dial your full attention for two unhurried minutes. Movement while every outlet is shut is unambiguous. Something past that meter is discharging water, and past the meter means your responsibility. If it is completely still and the bill is still high, you are looking at usage or an estimated reading instead. It is free, and it is the first question you will be asked when you phone.
Because of how little this particular network loses. Siza Water, the private concession that has run water here since 1999, reports losses of between 15 and 20 percent, against a South African average of 47 percent and a global average of 37. In most of this country a large share of what gets pumped never reaches a meter at all, so a mysterious bill has an obvious external suspect. Here there is no such suspect, and the arithmetic points inward at your own pipework.
No, and avoiding exactly that is the entire reason detection exists as a separate service. The method is elimination followed by listening. Valves are closed one by one until the losing branch identifies itself, which on its own removes most of the property from consideration. Ground microphones then follow that branch alone, because escaping water makes a noise at a frequency that carries through soil and concrete. Where the run passes beneath a floor, a thermal camera reads the temperature difference that moving water leaves behind it. The leak is marked with paint and agreed with you before anything is lifted. Do it the other way round, cutting trenches along a pipe run until something wet shows up, and the plumbing becomes the small half of the invoice while the reinstatement becomes the large one.
You do. Ownership changes hands at the meter. Up to it and including it, the supplier carries the cost. Past it, every metre is yours, and that takes in the stretch buried under your verge and lawn which you have never seen and did not choose. That boundary decides whether you are logging a call or booking a plumber, so it is worth establishing before anyone starts work. Establishing which side yours falls on is part of the visit, and sometimes that answer sends you to the supplier and leaves us with nothing at all to invoice.
Yes, and those are the ones most worth finding properly rather than guessing at. Beneath a floor slab the work is done by ear and by heat signature. Microphones follow the pipe run, and a thermal camera shows where warmed or chilled ground betrays water on the move. Inside a wall the usual giveaway is a damp pattern that does not match how the room is ventilated, confirmed with a pressure test that proves which circuit is losing. Either way the object is the same: mark one spot, open one spot.
It changes the economics considerably. A leak in an occupied house is usually caught within weeks because somebody hears it, sees a damp patch or notices the bill. A leak in a house that is shut from January to December runs for months at full flow before anyone is there to notice, and the damage compounds the whole time. If you own holiday or letting stock here, a meter reading taken remotely once a month is the cheapest insurance available to you.
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Losing water in Ballito with nothing to show for it? Describe what has been happening and a trace price comes back, fixed. Asking puts you under no obligation whatsoever.