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My water meter is running too high. The water meter is in fact spinning, but slowly, and I have not been able to find anything inside the house. Actually did find a leaky faucet that I slowed down but that's not the problem.
Looks like the leak is either behind a wall or under the basement floor.
So it appears I need to call in experts who have technology to detect and eventually repair the leak. I'm anticipating this will be expensive so I am looking for advice from anyone who's already been through it.
Anyone know what kind of technology is used to detect water leaks?
One vendor I have identified via google is Maxwell Plumbing in Bayside:
Has anyone had any dealings of any kind with them?
Other recommendations?
i was talking to rick at maxwell plumbing yesterday as they are a customer of mine and im working on an engineered project with them and i asked rick about this thread. he said they most certainly do leak detection but they dont use pressurized gas.
as kefir said finding a gas leak when you cant find a water leak doesnt seem easy.
he said any leak losing 70 gallons an hour has to be pretty apparent as water flow that great has to be accumulating some place and easy to track down.
Last edited by mathjak107; 09-16-2011 at 03:51 AM..
Finally, as of two days ago, this saga has been successfully concluded.
Initially I wanted one particular plumber to come in, locate the leak and correct the problem. After several delays, they came in identified the area of the basement where the leak was most likely. Only problem was lousy communication, as they quoted a very high estimate with nothing to back it up and wanted 50% of that before even scheduling the work!
Next step was to find another plumber, and I contacted Petri Plumbing. They came, looked things over, told me what I had to do in terms of clearing my horribly cluttered basement for them to do the work, and left it up to me. Took me way too long to clear the basement adequately, due to my age and bad back, but finally got it done and Joe from Petri came on Wednesday and fixed the problem in about 6 hours.
It is a very complicated heating system, that had been repaired once before, so Joe had to analyze the piping without being able to see a lot of it. In his first visit he was actually able to localize the area of the leak by just hearing the water exiting a pipe and seeing some pooling of water in the earth beneath the basement floor. So he had to do some demolition of a wall above that area to expose a return line that was the suspect source of the leak, before doing the necessary pipe work to eliminate the leak.
After being able to see all the piping, he came up with a very neat solution to eliminating the leaking pipe and reconnecting the system so that we could finally have our heating system in operation again. He contacted Mr. Petri the company owner who came by to check things out and he concurred with Joe's assessment of the problem and proposed solution.
A few hours later, Joe completed the repiping, doing a first class, very professional job. Next was bleeding the system, and checking all the radiators to ensure the system was operating properly.
The bill was a little under $2k, which I was very happy to pay to get a nice warm house again, with no space heaters. And it was significantly less than the first estimate I got.
A very important bonus is that the house no longer has any active piping below the basement floor for the heating system. Only water pipe still below the floor is the main water supply pipe which is buried in concrete.
So Petri is my plumber as long as I am in NYC, no question.
Last edited by speedoo; 12-17-2011 at 09:54 PM..
Reason: additonal info