Slab leak repair and leak detection in Jacksonville, FL
A JEA bill that jumped, a warm spot on the floor, a meter that moves with everything off: a plumber in Duval, St. Johns, Clay or Nassau who finds the leak before anyone opens the floor.
Most houses built on the First Coast since the 1950s sit on a concrete slab with the water lines under it. When a copper line under the slab develops a pinhole, nothing sprays; the water goes into the sand under the house, and the first sign is a JEA bill, a warm patch on the tile where the hot line runs, or the sound of water running with everything off. Arlington, Lakewood, the Beaches and old Mandarin are copper-under-slab neighborhoods, and their copper is now fifty to seventy years old.
When you call, say what you noticed (the bill, the warm spot, the sound, a wet baseboard, mold on a wall) and whether the water meter moves when every tap is closed.
Need a plumber? Call 904-750-4911
The meter test you can do first
Five minutes, no tools.
- Close every tap and make sure nothing is running: the washer, the dishwasher, the irrigation and the ice maker are all off.
- Open the meter box at the curb and look at the small dial or triangle on the meter face. JEA's newer meters show usage online as well, and its High Bills page walks through a water spike. If the dial turns with everything off, water is leaving the system.
- Close the house shutoff and look again. If the dial stops, the leak is inside the house or under the slab. If it keeps turning, the leak is in the service line between the meter and the house, which is the owner's pipe.
- A toilet is the most common inside leak: a few drops of food coloring in the tank, and color in the bowl ten minutes later means the flapper. That is a fixtures call, not a slab job.
How a leak is found
Detection is a diagnostic visit, and its result should be a mark on the floor and a written finding, not a guess.
- A pressure test on the hot and cold lines separately, isolating the leak to one side; most slab leaks are on the hot line.
- Acoustic listening on the slab and the walls, with the line pressurized.
- Thermal imaging for a hot-water leak, which warms the slab above it.
- A camera in the drain lines when the leak is a drain rather than a supply, which does not move the meter and shows up as a sinking floor, a smell, or a wet spot that does not track the supply routing.
Repair, reroute, or repipe
A slab leak gets repaired, rerouted or repiped, and the house decides which.
- A spot repair: open the slab at the mark, fix the section, close it. Least disruptive if the location is exact and the rest of the copper is sound.
- A reroute: abandon the leaking run under the slab and run a new line overhead through the attic. Common here because a copper line that has pinholed once will pinhole again.
- A repipe: when the leak is one of several, or the house has polybutylene or galvanized pipe, rerouting one line is a down payment on the rest. See the repiping page.
- A permit is required when pipe is replaced; the contractor pulls it. A repair over $5,000 on a direct contract also needs a Notice of Commencement recorded before the first inspection.