Zone Isolation & Pressure Testing
Sections are closed off and held under pressure one at a time, which proves whether the loss is under the slab at all before anything else happens.
Home / Slab Leak Detection
Slab leak detection in Durbanville finds a pipe leaking under a concrete floor without lifting the floor to look for it. We isolate and pressure test the zones, then pinpoint it acoustically, so what you are left with is a repair in one marked place rather than a search.
Tell us what you are seeing and we will call you back with an honest, upfront price before any work starts.
Nothing here involves lifting floor to see what is under it. The order matters, because each step rules out somewhere the water could be going.
Sections are closed off and held under pressure one at a time, which proves whether the loss is under the slab at all before anything else happens.
Water escaping a pressurised pipe under concrete makes a sound. Ground microphones follow it to the loudest point and that point is the leak.
A hot-water line leaking under a floor warms the slab above it, so a thermal camera often shows the run and the hot spot before a microphone goes down.
Where a leak is too small or too deep to hear, the line is charged with a detectable gas that rises through the slab and is picked up at the surface.
The finding is a mark on your floor, not a room or a wall. That is what keeps the opening to one cut instead of an exploratory trench.
Once the position is known, the two real options can be priced against each other and you choose on numbers rather than on advice.
A slab leak has a second cost that nobody warns you about, and it arrives by post. The pipe has been running into the ground for weeks or months, and every litre of it has been metered and billed to you. That part is not in dispute, because the leak is on your side of the connection. What is worth knowing is that the City of Cape Town's Water By-law treats this exact situation differently from every other leak on a property.
Section 34(3) is blunt: an owner is not entitled to a reduction of the amount payable for water wasted or lost in a water installation due to visible leaks. A dripping tap, a running toilet, a burst you walked past for a month: none of those earn any relief, and that is the rule almost everyone has heard some version of. Section 34(4) is the other half of it, and far fewer people know this one. Rebates will only be granted in terms of underground leaks, for the categories specified in the City's Tariff Policy, and where the repair of the leak was confirmed by an official of the City.
Read those two together and the logic is clear. The relief exists precisely for the leak you had no reasonable way of noticing, and a pipe weeping under a concrete floor is close to the definition of one. The thing that disqualifies most people is not the nature of their leak. It is that they discovered the rule too late.
The conditions are where the money is actually won or lost. A claim reaches back over the last three municipal bills and no further. Only one claim is allowed for a leak at any given property, so it can only ever be spent once. The cost of the wasted water is shared equally between the City and the owner, which means the best possible outcome is half, never all of it. The repair has to be done by a qualified plumber who furnishes you with a plumbing certificate, and the rebate is made conditional on applying and paying for an activated Water Management Device. On top of that sits the City's stepped tariff, which charges a higher rate per kilolitre the more you use, so a leak running day and night does not merely add litres to the account, it drags the whole month's consumption into a dearer band.
The part that quietly costs people money: the window is three bills and the claim is once per property, so every month spent deciding whether to investigate is a month of rebate that cannot be recovered afterwards. If the bill has climbed and nothing is visible, the cheapest move is to establish quickly whether the water is going under the floor or somewhere else entirely. If it turns out not to be the slab, leak detection in Durbanville covers the rest of the house, and pool leak detection in Durbanville covers the other common culprit behind an unexplained bill.
A rebate claim and an insurance claim both turn on documentation, so the job is written up whether or not the news is good.
The things that come up again and again in local reviews, and the things we care most about getting right.
You get the price before we start, so there is no surprise call-out fee on the invoice.
Quick call-outs across Durbanville and the northern suburbs during business hours.
Based in Durbanville and quick to reach right across the northern suburbs.
We treat your home with care and clean up before we leave.
The detection is quoted separately from the repair and you get the figure before we start. We keep them separate on purpose, because bundling them gives a plumber a reason to find something. Detection on a single-storey home with reasonable access is a smaller job than one on a double-storey with a complicated manifold, so the honest answer is that it depends on the property and we will tell you what it is for yours before anyone lifts anything.
Three things account for most of them. The pipe sits in or under concrete with no room to move, so it takes the strain every time the ground shifts or the building settles. It cannot be inspected, so a weep that would be spotted in a roof space goes unnoticed for years. And the hot line runs hotter than anything else in the house, which accelerates whatever corrosion or fatigue has already started. That is why the hot-water run under a slab fails more often than the cold one.
Finding it, yes. That is the entire point of the detection, and the floor stays down while we do it. Repairing it is a different question, and the honest answer is that a repair in place means opening the floor at the marked spot. What detection changes is the size of that opening: one measured cut rather than a search across a room.
It depends on where the leak is and what is on top of it, which is why we price both once we know the position. Breaking in is often cheaper where the spot is in a passage or under an unfussy floor. A re-route, abandoning the buried section and running a new line overhead or around, usually wins where the leak is under fitted kitchen units, under a staircase, or under a tiled floor you cannot match any more. Where an old galvanised line has already failed once under the slab, a re-route also removes the section most likely to fail again.
South African household policies commonly draw a distinction between the damage the water caused, the cost of finding the leak, and the pipe itself, and they do not all treat those three the same way. Some policies include a leak detection or trace-and-access benefit, others do not. Read your schedule or ask your broker specifically about trace and access before you commit to anything, because the answer changes what the job should cost you rather than what it costs. We will provide documentation of what was found and where either way.
Possibly, and a slab leak is one of the few that can qualify. The Water By-law says an owner is not entitled to a reduction for water lost to visible leaks, and that rebates are only granted for underground leaks in the categories set out in the Tariff Policy and where a City official has confirmed the repair. The practical conditions matter as much as the principle: the claim reaches back over the last three municipal bills, one claim is allowed per property, the cost of the wasted water is shared equally between the City and the owner, and the repair must be done by a qualified plumber who gives you a plumbing certificate. Whether a rebate is granted is the City's decision, not ours.
Long enough to be sure, which usually means working through the zones in order rather than going straight to the spot that looks obvious. Isolating and pressure testing sections is what separates a leak under the slab from a leak in a wall or a dripping mixer somewhere else in the house, and skipping that step is how people end up with a hole in the right room and the wrong floor. We would rather take the extra hour than mark the wrong place.
Then we tell you that, and we tell you what we ruled out, which is worth something on its own. Pressure testing that clears the under-slab lines means the water is going somewhere else, and that redirects the search instead of ending it. What we will not do is mark a spot we are not confident about and let you pay to open a floor on a guess.
Get In Touch
Think the leak is under your floor? Fill in the form and we will get back to you with a free, no-obligation quote.