Simple locates: $200–$400
Short runs, decent access, leak confirmed and marked without drama.
Leaks Found, Not Guessed
Water Leak
Detection In
Chatswood
Somewhere between the meter and your taps, water is escaping, you can see it on the bill even when you cannot see it anywhere else. We pinpoint concealed leaks across Chatswood with instruments instead of crowbars, so the repair opens one small hole in exactly the right place.
- Licence 368473C, fully insured
- Acoustic, thermal & pressure instruments
- Found and fixed by the same crew
Three Instruments, One Answer, In Chatswood
A hidden leak cannot help giving itself away three times over. Escaping water under pressure sings at frequencies acoustic gear can chase along a pipe run; it changes the temperature of whatever it soaks, which thermal imaging paints in false colour through wall sheeting and slab surfaces; and it bleeds pressure from whichever isolated section of pipework it lives on, which a gauge catches cold. One signal suggests; three signals triangulate.
That triangulation is what you are actually buying. Where the readings converge, we mark the floor, and in Chatswood’s renovated homes, where pipework wanders in ways no council plan ever recorded, that mark routinely sits metres from where anyone would have started digging on instinct. The difference between those two points is the difference between lifting three tiles and re-doing a bathroom.
A century of pipework, and no plan of any of it
Leafy interwar streets toward Lane Cove let roots invade cracked clay drains, choking the flow and backing up gullies.
Older homes are a record of everyone who has worked on them. Original runs, a post-war bathroom teed in somewhere unexpected, a laundry added in the sixties, and nothing documented.
That is why detection on a heritage-era property starts by establishing where the pipes actually go. Tracing the layout is half the job and it is the half that prevents opening the wrong wall.
Water coming through the ceiling
The apartment showing the damage is almost never the apartment with the fault. Water tracks along the top of a slab, through penetrations and down whichever path is available, which can be several metres laterally before it enters your ceiling.
High-rise living around the Interchange means grease, wipes and food waste clog common sewer stacks, the most frequent blockage we clear in Chatswood.
Thermal imaging and moisture mapping from below will usually establish the direction it is arriving from, which narrows the source before anyone needs access to a neighbour's bathroom.
Retaining walls, terraces and the services behind them
Chatswood is a major North Shore hub (postcode 2067) built around its rail interchange and Westfield, bordering Willoughby, Artarmon, Roseville and Lane Cove North. Its mix of dense apartment towers and older homes on the valley slopes gives us a full range of blocked-drain work.
Sloping blocks are full of retaining structures, and pipework often runs behind or beneath them because there was nowhere else to put it. A leak in that position saturates backfill, and saturated backfill is what makes retaining walls move.
Water showing at the base of a wall is worth treating as urgent even when the volume looks trivial. The plumbing repair is small compared with what the wall costs.
When a drain leak undermines itself
A cracked earthenware line leaking into its own trench washes out the bedding supporting it. Losing support, the pipe sags; sagging, it holds water; holding water, it collects solids and eventually blocks.
Original earthenware pipes under 1920s–30s homes crack and sag with age, snagging debris and causing slow, recurring blockages.
Which is why a drain that has begun to block regularly and a drain that is leaking are frequently the same drain at different stages. Finding it early is considerably cheaper than finding it once it has collapsed.
Damp that is not necessarily plumbing
Older houses have rising damp, failed flashings, blocked subfloor vents and perished mortar, all of which produce symptoms that look exactly like a leak.
Establishing which one you have is worth doing before any pipe is repaired. A moisture profile that peaks at floor level and falls with height points at rising damp; one that peaks at a fixture or a pipe run points at plumbing.
Whose leak is it in an apartment?
The technical question and the financial question have different answers, and both need settling. Pipework serving only your lot is yours; risers, mains and common-property lines belong to the owners corporation.
A leak detection report that names the line, the lot and the direction of travel is what turns a dispute into a decision. That is what we write, because a description of where the water appeared settles nothing.
Insurance and leak detection
Many home policies contribute to the cost of locating a leak, sometimes as a specific benefit separate from the damage itself. It is one of the more commonly unclaimed entitlements in home insurance simply because people do not know it is there.
Check before you book, and keep the report. Ours is written to be handed to an assessor: what was tested, what was found, where, and what it will take to repair.
What it costs in Chatswood
The standard hunt, $300–$500
First hour with the full instrument kit, acoustic, thermal, pressure, on a typical concealed leak.
Long or awkward traces, $100–$250/hr
Beyond the first hour: extended runs, tight access, multiple suspects to eliminate.
The genuinely hard ones, up to ~$900
Deep slab lines and multi-storey mysteries at the top of Sydney's range.
The repair itself, quoted on evidence
Priced off exactly what the detection proved, fixed before it starts, same crew, same visit, no second call-out.
Compare it with exploratory demolition, which costs more than detection before it has even guessed right once. Figures here are indicative of the 2026 Sydney market rather than a quote from us, you get your own number as a fixed price before any work starts.
How The Hunt Runs
Step 01
Step 01
Confirm Before Chasing
The meter test done properly, plus your bills. If the evidence says there is no supply leak to find, you hear exactly that, free of a detection invoice.
Step 02
Corner It
Isolating pipework section by section against a pressure gauge, hot versus cold, line by line, convicts one run and acquits the rest.
Step 03
Mark The Spot
Acoustic tracking and thermal imaging walk the guilty run until the signals stack. The X on the floor is accurate to centimetres.
Step 04
One Hole, One Fix
Access opens exactly at the mark; the failed section is repaired and pressure-tested. If the run's condition argues for a reroute instead, both numbers land first.
Failed The Meter Test Just Now?
Then the leak is real and already on the clock. Book the detection before it surfaces somewhere expensive.
Run the meter test, every water user off, read the dial, wait thirty minutes, read again. Movement convicts; stillness acquits the supply side. Around it, watch for the classic tells: an unexplained bill jump, a warm patch of slab, one wall growing damp or mould, water sounds in a silent house. Test first, book second, in that order.
In 2026: simple locates $200 to $400, the typical concealed-leak job $300 to $500 for the fully-equipped first hour, then $100 to $250 an hour for long traces, topping out near $900 for the genuinely difficult ones. The repair is quoted separately on what the detection proves, evidence-based numbers rather than educated guesses.
By making the leak testify against itself three ways. Section-by-section pressure testing names the guilty line; thermal imaging shows the warm or wet plume through the slab surface, leaking hot lines glow obligingly; acoustic gear follows the escape sound to its loudest point. Where all three agree, we open centimetres of concrete instead of trenching the lounge room.
It is practically the job description of a slab leak, hundreds of litres a day into the ground under the house, invisible for a quarter or two until the bill files its report. That is why the meter test matters: it catches what your eyes cannot, in half an hour, for free. Sydney Water gives the same advice for good reason.
Everything on your side of the meter connection is yours; the meter and the mains beyond belong to Sydney Water. Practical translation: water pooling on the footpath or a weeping meter assembly, report it to Sydney Water. Meter turning while your house is silent, the leak is on your side, and finding it is our department.
The finding damages nothing, that is the entire premise. The fixing needs one opening at the pinpointed mark: a tile section up, one wall cut, or a small slab window, sized to the repair. Set that against old-school exploratory plumbing, which opens surfaces in order of suspicion and averages several misses per hit.
The evidence arrives first: which line, exactly where, and what condition the run is in. Then a fixed repair price, with the work usually done the same visit through the one access point. If the pipe's overall state means today's pinhole is just the first episode, we say so, reroute and replacement numbers beside the repair, your decision with everything on the table.
Pinpoint The Leak This Week In Chatswood
Instruments, evidence, one precise repair: and a bill that goes back to normal.
