Burst pipes and slab leaks
traced across Liverpool

Turn the water off at the meter, usually at the front boundary, clockwise until it stops. If water is anywhere near a light fitting, a power point or the switchboard, kill the power at the main switch first. Then open the lowest tap in the house, generally an outside garden tap, so what is left in the pipes drains out there rather than into a ceiling. If you are in a newer estate home and the water is coming up through the floor rather than down from above, say that when you call, it points at the slab and changes what we bring.

It is a leak on a water line run in or under the concrete slab the house sits on. Almost every home in the growth area estates is slab-on-ground, so it is a real possibility out there in a way it is not in an older raised house. The signs are indirect because you cannot see the pipe: a patch of floor that is unexplainably warm, flooring lifting or cupping in one area, a damp edge along a wall, water appearing at the slab edge outside, or a bill that has jumped with nothing visible anywhere. The meter test settles whether water is escaping. Finding where is the specialised part.

That is the entire point of locating properly, and it matters more here than in a house with a subfloor you can crawl under. We use acoustic listening along the line and thermal imaging, which is particularly effective on a slab because a hot water leak warms the concrete above it in a pattern you can see. We then mark the position on the surface. That turns a repair that could mean lifting a floor into one small opening in a known place, or in some cases a rerouted line that avoids opening the slab at all.

In an older Liverpool house that is a classic galvanised steel symptom. Galvanised water pipe corrodes from the inside, so the bore closes up gradually over decades and the pressure falls so slowly that nobody notices until a visitor comments on the shower. Rust-coloured water first thing in the morning is the other tell. It matters because the same corrosion that is closing the pipe is thinning its wall, so falling pressure in a sixty-year-old house is early warning rather than an inconvenience.

Turn every tap and appliance off and watch the meter. If the dial is still moving, water is escaping on your side, and that settles it in ten minutes without anyone attending. Where it is escaping is the harder question, and on a slab-on-ground house the answer is frequently that it is going into the ground under the concrete, which is why there is nothing to see. The meter is the reliable witness here, not your eyes.

No, and that is worth pursuing rather than absorbing. Residential building work in New South Wales carries statutory warranties under the Home Building Act, running from completion: six years for a major defect, two years for everything else, and they pass to later owners for whatever period is left. A failed fitting or a line damaged during construction sits squarely in that territory. Whether a particular claim succeeds is not ours to say, but a located fault, photographed, with a written report, is what any claim needs. We make the water safe first and document properly second.

Usually the damage is and the pipe itself usually is not. Most policies cover water damage to the building and contents from a sudden burst, exclude the cost of repairing the pipe that failed, and exclude damage from a leak that has been seeping gradually rather than bursting. Slab leaks are where that distinction bites, because they are gradual by nature and are often found late. Sydney Water has a concealed leak allowance in some circumstances and it needs the repair documented, so keep every piece of paper we give you.