Established in Caldwell, Idaho in 1945, we run leak locates throughout the greater Treasure Valley. The job is not "find water." It is getting from somewhere in the house to a paint mark on the floor, because how precisely a leak is located decides how big the repair has to be.
The symptoms that actually mean a hidden leak
A bill that jumped with no change in habits. A pinhole you cannot see runs 24 hours a day, because a supply line stays pressurized whether you are home or not. Compare to the same month last year, not last month; irrigation season skews month-over-month badly here.
Running water with everything off. Late at night, in the quietest room, a steady hiss behind drywall or under a floor is pressurized water escaping a small opening.
A warm spot on the floor. On slab-on-grade construction this is close to diagnostic: the leak is on the hot side, under the concrete, heating the slab above it. People find these barefoot; pets find them by lying on the warm patch.
Damp baseboard, cupping laminate, or grout that stays dark. Water tracks under a floor and surfaces at the lowest porous point, often feet from the break. Where you see water is not where the leak is, and that is why people open the wrong wall.
A musty or mildew smell in one closet or cabinet. Smell shows up before staining. A sink base that smells wrong with dry-looking wood usually has a weeping angle stop or a drain tailpiece wicking into particle board.
A pump that short-cycles. On acreage around Middleton, Wilder, and Homedale, a well or booster pump kicking on every few minutes with nobody using water means a pressurized leak.
Run the meter test before you call
Twenty minutes of your time changes what we load on the truck.
1. Shut off everything that uses water: ice maker, humidifier, softener, irrigation.
2. Open the meter box, usually a lid between the sidewalk and the street.
3. Find the leak indicator, a small triangle, star, or gear that spins on very low flow. Photograph the reading.
4. Wait 20 to 30 minutes with zero water use, then read it again.
If the indicator moved, you are losing water. Now cut the problem in half: close the main shutoff where the service line enters the house, in the crawlspace, garage wall, or basement wall, and watch again. Still moving means the leak is outside, in the service line. Stopped means it is inside.
One local caveat: most of this valley waters off pressurized irrigation, a separate system with its own point of connection. A wet patch in the lawn in July is often irrigation, and it never shows on your culinary meter.
Supply side or drain side: the first fork in the road
Supply lines are pressurized all the time, so a supply leak runs constantly, registers on the meter, and gets worse. Drain lines only carry water when something upstream runs, so a drain leak is intermittent: damp after a shower, dry by afternoon, wet again after laundry, and invisible on the meter.
That one distinction decides the whole diagnostic. If the meter sits dead still and you still have moisture, stop chasing the supply system. We prove a drain leak with fixture-by-fixture water testing and a camera in the pipe. A sewer camera inspection shows the crack, offset joint, failed hub, or root intrusion doing the leaking, with a footage count from a known access point so we know how far in it sits.
Older Caldwell and Boise neighborhoods make this common. Cast iron breaches along the bottom of the pipe where solids sit, clay laterals move at every joint, and Orangeburg fiber pipe deforms into an oval and splits. All three leak into the soil under a house long before anything backs up into a tub. If the camera finds a line holding water and debris we clear it first, at the flat $59 drain cleaning price on a standard accessible cleanout.
What a slab leak means in Treasure Valley construction
A slab leak is a failure in a water line running inside or beneath a concrete floor, so it only applies to slab-on-grade homes: much of what was built from the 1990s onward in Meridian, Kuna, Star, south Nampa, and newer Eagle subdivisions. If your home has a basement or crawlspace, which covers most older Caldwell, Boise North End, and Bench housing, you almost certainly have a crawlspace leak instead. That is far less work to reach and often a same-visit repair.
The hot side fails more than the cold side. Hot water moves faster and cycles the pipe on every draw, so copper rubbing a rough spot in concrete eventually wears through. That is why a warm floor is such a strong signal, and why we pressure-test hot and cold separately instead of testing the house as one system.
It is usually not the hard water. Our water is hard and scale is real, but the failure under a slab is normally external: pinhole corrosion where copper meets damp soil or concrete, abrasion where a line crosses the slab without a sleeve, or stress at an elbow. That tells us whether one repair holds or whether the run fails again in two years.
How we locate it without demolition
Each step shrinks the search area:
- Static pressure test, about 15 minutes. Gauge on a hose bibb, main closed, watch for decay. Confirms a pressurized leak and separates house from service line.
- Loop isolation. Close the water heater valves, pressurize hot and cold independently, then isolate branches where the plumbing allows. A whole-house problem becomes one loop.
- Acoustic listening. Escaping water hisses, and the loudest point on the floor sits over the leak. Ground microphones and a listening disc, with the house quiet: HVAC off, ice maker off. Raising pressure slightly makes a quiet leak sing.
- Thermal imaging. The best tool there is for a hot-side slab leak. The warm plume reads through tile, vinyl, and often carpet and pad before any moisture shows.
- Tracer gas. When noise or a deep pour defeats acoustic work, we drain the section, introduce an inert tracer gas, and sniff for it at the surface. Gas migrates up through concrete where sound will not carry.
- Moisture mapping. Pin and pinless meters across drywall and subfloor to draw the wet footprint, keeping any demo inside a known boundary.
Most residential locates finish in 60 to 120 minutes. You get a marked spot, photos, and a written scope. If there is no leak, we tell you that too.
Precision is what keeps the repair small
The leak does not set the cost of the job. The location does. A slab leak pinned to within a few inches is a small opening in the concrete, a coupling, and a patch. The same leak known only as "somewhere in that end of the house" is a saw cut across a living room, flooring you cannot match, and days of drying equipment.
The locate also picks the repair path. A single failure in a straight run is a spot repair. A line that has failed twice, or a slab run with corrosion history, is a candidate for a reroute: abandon the pipe in the slab and run new line overhead, taking that section permanently out from under the concrete. We do not quote either before we know where the leak is. The free on-site estimate is written after the locate, with the variables named: hot or cold side, floor finish and depth, pipe material, access, and repair versus replace.
Outdoor leaks: between the meter and the house
If the meter kept moving with the house main closed, the leak is in the service line, not inside the building. Look for lawn that stays green and soft into August, a sunken area near the meter box, or house pressure that quietly dropped over a season. These hide well where the water table is already high, such as the Boise River corridor through Garden City and Eagle, because the soil gives no dry contrast, so the meter and pressure tests do the work your eyes cannot. Old galvanized and early poly lines are the usual failures, along with shallow bury depth that has taken thirty winters of freeze and thaw. That is a different repair from an indoor leak, and we cover it in full on our outdoor water line leak page.
Book the diagnostic
Before we arrive: find the main shutoff and confirm it closes, photograph the meter and the bill, and do not cut drywall on a guess. An opened wall in the wrong place costs you the repair you were trying to avoid, and it destroys the moisture pattern we read the leak from.
If the meter test says supply, we bring the locate gear. If the meter is still and you still have water where it does not belong, the answer is in a drain line, and a camera is the right first move:
- Sewer camera inspection — the defect on screen, with footage and photos
- Sewer camera inspection in Boise
- Sewer camera inspection in Meridian
- Sewer camera inspection in Nampa
- Sewer camera inspection in Eagle
