Basic detection — $200–$400
Straightforward jobs: a limited pipe run, good access, the leak confirmed and marked.
Precision Leak Location
Find That Leak
Fast Across
Dural
A leak you cannot see is still on the meter, still under the slab, still soaking the wall cavity. We find them with listening gear, thermal imaging and pressure testing — so the repair needs one small hole in the right place, not three big ones in guesses.
- Licence 368473C — fully insured
- Acoustic, thermal & pressure instruments
- Found and fixed by the same crew
How A Hidden Leak Gives Itself Up In Dural
Every concealed leak makes three things: a sound, a temperature difference, and a pressure drop. The gear reads all three. Acoustic equipment listens for the specific frequency of water escaping under pressure and gets louder as we track along the line; thermal imaging paints the wet path through a wall or the warm plume of a leaking hot line under a slab; and isolating sections of pipework against a pressure gauge proves exactly which run is losing water and which is sound.
Cross-referenced, they put an X on the floor within centimetres. That precision is the entire point — the difference between lifting three tiles and re-tiling a bathroom. It matters double under Dural’s older homes, where pipes wander in ways no plan ever recorded, and the "obvious" place to dig is reliably wrong.
Check This Before Read Your Meter
Not every scary water bill is a hidden leak, and a detection visit you did not need is money we should not take. Two minutes at the water meter answers most of it before anyone books anything.
The half-hour meter protocol
- Bring the house to silence. Every tap, hose, dishwasher, washer and irrigation zone off — and let the cisterns finish refilling before you start the clock.
- Photograph, wait thirty, compare. Any movement on the dial with zero legitimate use is your answer: water is leaving on its own. Speed of movement ≈ size of leak.
- Put the toilets in the dock first. A silently running cistern fakes more "mystery leaks" than any pipe. Dye in the tank; colour in the bowl within fifteen minutes unflushed closes the case.
- A still dial changes the question. Damp with no meter movement is not a supply leak — think drainage, shower seals or condensation. Different trade, different fix, better to know today.
Where Dural leaks like to hide
Concealed leaks around Dural have local habits. Heavy rain off Dural’s sloping garden blocks and long driveways overwhelms pits and ag drains, choking stormwater lines until they surcharge.
On top of that, water travels before it surfaces around here — damp can show up metres downhill of the failure. The instruments do not care where it surfaces; they find where it leaves the pipe.
What it costs in Dural
Typical first hour — $300–$500
The standard concealed-leak hunt with the full kit on site — acoustic, thermal, pressure testing.
Extended tracing — $100–$250/hr after
Long pipe runs, poor access or multiple leaks add gauge-and-listen time past the first hour.
Hard-to-access leaks — up to ~$900
Deep slab lines and complex multi-storey tracing sit at the top of the Sydney range.
The repair — priced on what we find
Detection tells you exactly what the repair involves, so the repair quote is built on evidence. One crew does both — no handover, no second call-out fee.
Weigh it against the alternative: exploratory demolition starts at more than detection costs, and it starts in the wrong place. 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.
The Hunt, In Four Moves
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.
Meter Creeping With Everything Off?
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.
Sydney 2026 rates: $200 to $400 for straightforward locates, $300 to $500 for the fully-instrumented first hour on a typical concealed leak, then $100 to $250 an hour for long traces, peaking near $900 for genuinely difficult access. The repair prices separately — off evidence, which is precisely the point.
Three instruments cross-examine it. Pressure isolation names the guilty line. Thermal imaging shows the plume through the slab — leaking hot lines practically wave. Acoustic gear follows the escape noise to its loudest point. Where all three agree, we open centimetres of concrete, not a trench through the living room.
It is the signature move of a slab leak: hundreds of litres a day into the ground, zero visible evidence, one horrifying quarterly bill. The meter protocol exists exactly for this — thirty silent minutes tells you what your eyes cannot. Sydney Water's own advice runs the same way: bill jumped, test the meter.
The rule of thumb: pipework on your property up to the meter connection is yours; the meter itself and the mains past it are Sydney Water's. If the wet patch is on the footpath side or the meter assembly itself is weeping, report it to Sydney Water first. Anything past the meter is ours to find and fix.
Finding it — no; that is the entire pitch of non-invasive detection. The repair needs access at the pinpointed spot: typically one lifted tile section, one wall cut or one small slab opening, at the mark, sized to the job. Compare that with exploratory plumbing, which opens surfaces until the leak turns up — usually on the third try.
You get the evidence first: which line, where exactly, and what state the run is in. Then one fixed price, with the repair typically done through the single access point the same visit. If the pipe's condition says this pinhole has siblings coming, you hear that too — reroute and replacement numbers beside the patch price, decision yours.
Locate It This Week Anywhere In Dural
Non-invasive detection, evidence before quotes, and one crew for the find and the fix.
