Stealthy Leakage

Somewhere in our house, water is escaping. I can hear it. At three in the morning I can detect the tiny whoosh from the pipes when nothing should be moving.

I’ve checked all the obvious places. Replaced a few likely suspects. But the noise remains. Now, normally I don’t have a problem finding out where water is coming from. Ceilings change shape, objects underneath the flow become unexpectedly glossy, or suddenly go mouldy. But this leak is stealthy. There is no evidence at all. Anywhere. Everything is just as it should be, apart from the sound.

At one point I started to doubt myself. However, Dave came round last night and he heard it too. And (and this is the clincher) he heard it stop when I turned the water off.  The prevailing wisdom is that a pipe underneath the floorboards somewhere downstairs is leaking straight down into the ground. In the fullness of time this probably means that we will have our own indoor swimming pool, followed shortly by a moat.

I hate having a problem I don’t know how to solve. If this was a programming fault I’d be bunging breakpoints in, adding debugging code and generally getting to the bottom of things. If it was a piece of hardware I’d be working out where best to hit it. But when a pipe just disappears into a wall it is kind of hard to discover what is going on. I think I might need to engage stronger powers than mine on this one, in other words it might be time to find a plumber…

Comments

[George Birbilis]

Try increasing / decreasing the water flow. Does the sound increase / decrease too? Iincrease f it doesn't it should be small leakage

[George Birbilis]

your blog's text editor has problem with IE8... both in display and in final text submitted - messes it up

[George Birbilis]

btw, in some houses there's a central place with many switches for the various pipes, can try switching them on-off there to see which exact subnet is problematic - usually is at connections with faucets or at that cabinet/pipe switch board itself etc.

[Rob]

Thanks for that. Unfortunately my house is so old that there is no central switching point.I think I'll just pay money to make it someone else's problem.

I'm using IE8 myself at the momement, and there are some rendering problems with the edit windows. I'll report this to my service provider. It seems to work better when you select the backwards compatible option.

[Simon Johnson]

Have you not thought that as you use the hot pipes during the day, some water is left as steam on the insides of the pipes. When the temperaure drops this water condenses and forms into small rivulets of running water that move along the pipe building in pressure as the pipe cools. The water probably gathers at the pipe end until the next tap is used.

That or your house is magical. Or you have Borrowers who are turning one of the taps on to brush their teeth before they go to slee[!