Leak Detection in Orchard Place

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.

In Des Plaines the real question is the b-box to the house, and that stretch belongs to the owner. City code has the city maintaining the shutoff valve in the b-box near the sidewalk, and the owner maintaining the service line from there to the building. Because code also puts the meter inside near where the pipe enters, the meter sits at the house end of that run, not the street end. In Waycinden Park, where Illinois American Water is the utility, ask Illinois American where its part stops.

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.

It depends on what the detection finds, which is why the two are quoted apart. Locating is normally a single visit. A joint in an open basement ceiling can often be repaired the same day, while a buried service line five feet down means digging and usually a city permit for the repair. We locate the leak, mark it and put it in writing; the repair is a separate written quote from whichever plumber you choose.