Leak Detection in Downtown Des Plaines

Isolate first, then bring the equipment. Shutting sections off one at a time tells you where to point it; acoustic listening, a thermal camera and a moisture meter then find it without opening anything.

Ground microphones, thermal cameras, moisture meters, pressure gauges and tracer gas, a hydrogen and nitrogen mix that rises through soil. Which one depends on where the pipe runs.

Often because a reading caught up, not because a pipe broke. Des Plaines bills every two months from a remote reader outside the house, and the city asks owners with inside meters to call in an inside reading once a year, because a slow or stalled remote can under-record for months. Compare the dial on the meter with the reading on the bill first. If they match and the bill is still high, turn every fixture off and watch the low-flow indicator; movement means something inside is running. In Waycinden Park the bill comes from Illinois American, so ask it how your meter is read.

Split the plumbing in halves until one half is left. Fixtures off and the dial moving puts the loss inside; closing the water heater's cold inlet and seeing the dial stop puts it on the hot side; a few drops of food coloring in each toilet tank clears or convicts the toilets. If the dial never moves but water still appears where the service pipe enters through the foundation wall, the buried stretch before an inside meter is the suspect, and that part needs listening equipment, thermal imaging or tracer gas.

Call whoever can tell you what kind of water it is, because the right trade depends on that. Clean water that turns up in dry weather is supply, and ours to find. Water rising through a floor drain is the sewer, and the city's Flood Rebate Program helps toward backwater valves and overhead sewers. Water at the joint between floor and wall after rain is a drainage job, and river water is the river. We will say which you have even when the answer is that you do not need us.