Found with equipment rather than guesswork, and starting with the question that matters on this ground: is the water escaping, or is it arriving?
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A damp patch tells you where water ended up. It says nothing at all about where it came from, and on this ground there are two quite different answers.
Water escaping is a leak. Something on your side of the meter is losing, continuously, under pressure, and it does not care what the weather is doing.
Water arriving is the other one, and it is common here. The town centre sits in a depression on the Terrys Creek floodplain and water crossing the suburb passes the rail corridor at a handful of points, so on the low ground there is a lot of water moving about in a storm. Damp that appears with the rain and fades afterwards is usually about where that water is going outside the building.
They have opposite answers. One needs a repair, the other needs gutters, downpipes and ground levels dealt with. Getting it the wrong way round is how somebody pays to open a wall that was never leaking.
The tap under the sink, or the main at the meter. Stopping the water matters more than the drive does.
Turn the water off at the meter before you do anything else, including ringing us. What a burst costs is very largely a function of how long the supply stayed on, and nothing you do afterwards recovers the minutes you spend looking for the tap.
Which is the argument for finding your meter and stop tap on a quiet afternoon rather than in the dark in the rain. It takes two minutes now and it is the highest-value two minutes in this trade.
This is the first question we ask on this side of Eastwood and it is not small talk. Water that appears during heavy rain and recedes as it eases is behaving like ground water, not like a leak in a pressurised pipe.
A pressure leak does not care what the sky is doing. It runs at the same rate on a dry Tuesday as it does in a storm, which is why the weather is diagnostic here in a way it would not be on flat ground away from a constriction.
Write down when it happens, for how long, and whether it eased before or after the rain did. Two or three observations are worth more than any single visit, because a leak that only appears in particular conditions is very hard to catch on a dry afternoon.
Close every tap and appliance in the house, then watch the smallest dial on the water meter for a few minutes. If it is completely still, water is not leaving your system and whatever you are seeing has another explanation.
If it is creeping, water is escaping somewhere between the meter and your fixtures. That whole length is the owner's responsibility rather than the water authority's, which includes the buried run across the front of the property that nobody thinks about until a bill arrives with an extra digit.
Do it twice, a few hours apart, before concluding anything. A dial that moves once and not again is usually a cistern that refilled or an appliance that cycled, which is a different and much cheaper problem than a leak in the ground.
If the dial is moving, shut the isolating valve on the hot water system and watch again. If the meter stops, the leak is on the hot side. If it keeps going, it is on the cold.
That single step halves the search before anybody has been paid for anything, and it is the difference between an afternoon of tracing and a targeted look at half the house. It costs nothing but the time to do it properly.
Water that escapes a pipe does not fall straight down. It runs along whatever it meets first, a pipe, a bearer, the edge of a slab, and it surfaces at the first opportunity it is given.
So the stain marks where the water finally found a way out of the structure, not where it came out of the pipe. Opening the wall under the damp patch is a coin toss, and a wrong opening is a repair you did not need on top of the one you did.
The braided hose from the wall to the tap under a sink or vanity is a wearing part, not permanent plumbing. Manufacturers commonly nominate around five years, and almost nobody has thought about theirs since the bathroom was done.
When one lets go it is not a drip, it is mains pressure with nothing in the way. Open the cupboard and look at the braid: fraying, rust spots or broken strands mean replace it now rather than soon. It is ten minutes and it is the cheapest insurance in the house.
While you are in there, note where the isolating valve under that fixture is and whether it actually turns. A valve nobody has moved in fifteen years is frequently seized, and the moment you need it is the worst moment to discover that.
The copper in these houses has been in service since the subdivision and it does not fail all at once. It thins, and pinholes appear where a fitting or a bend has been working hardest, which is why a first leak is so often followed by a second somewhere else.
That does not mean re-piping a whole house on the strength of one repair. It does mean a third leak in eighteen months is the pipework telling you something, and at that point repairing individual failures stops being the cheaper option.
There is a decision buried in that, and it belongs to the owner rather than to us. What we can do is say honestly how many failures we have attended, what condition the pipe looked in at each, and what a staged replacement costs against continuing to repair. What we will not do is push a re-pipe off the back of one pinhole.
This is common and it is worth acting on rather than watching. A leak on a buried external run can disperse underground for months without ever surfacing, so the bill is the only symptom you are going to get.
Another quarter of it costs more than the investigation does. The meter test above will tell you in five minutes whether there is anything to look for, and it is free.
Once the meter says water is genuinely leaving, the job is to turn an area into a point before anybody cuts into a wall or a floor.
Acoustic listening picks up the sound a pressurised escape makes through building materials, and it is more precise than people expect. Pressure testing isolates sections so the leak can be narrowed by elimination rather than by guesswork. Thermal imaging is the useful one on a hot water line, because a leak on the hot side warms whatever is around it and that shows up plainly.
Which of the three we reach for depends on what is leaking and where it runs, and frequently it is all three. The point of all of it is the same: one opening in the right place, made once, rather than three hopeful ones on the way to it. Where the leak is genuinely inaccessible we will say so and price the alternatives, including abandoning a run and re-routing it, rather than opening ground on the chance.
Fixed price agreed before anything starts. These are indicative 2026 ranges.
Located to a small area with equipment, not opened on a guess.
One figure to stop it, whatever hour it happens.
Depending on where it is and what has to be reached.
The cheapest worthwhile job on this page, by a wide margin.
What was found and what caused it, which matters to an insurer.
Whether the damp tracks the rain or is there regardless. That decides whether we are looking for a leak at all.
Everything off, read, wait, read again. A number rather than an opinion.
Isolating sections, then acoustic and thermal equipment on the section that is losing.
The repair, plus what was found and what we think caused it, in writing.
Ring and a licensed plumber picks up. We will talk you through isolating it before anybody sets off.
Call 1300 381 569The meter settles it in an hour. Turn every tap off, make sure nothing is refilling, read the meter, wait an hour and read it again. Movement means water is leaving your system. No movement, with damp appearing after rain, means water is arriving from somewhere else.
Almost certainly arriving rather than escaping. A leak under pressure does not wait for weather. Damp that tracks the rain is about where water is going outside the building: gutters, downpipes, paving levels or ground that sits against the wall.
A failed flexible hose under a sink or basin. They go without warning, wide open, at mains pressure, usually in a cupboard nobody looks in. If you cannot remember replacing yours, they are old enough to replace.
Nearly always. Acoustic and thermal equipment narrows it to a small area, and isolating sections tells us which side of the property is losing. Opening on a guess is the expensive way and it is not how we work.
Do the meter test first, because it costs nothing and it converts a suspicion into a fact. If the meter moves with everything off, water is going somewhere, and it needs locating rather than guessing.
Isolate it. The tap under the sink, the valve behind the toilet, or the main at the meter. Stopping the water is what limits the damage, and it is almost always something you can do yourself.
Leak detection is $250 to $550. A burst pipe made safe is $250 to $500. A repair after locating is $350 to $900 depending on access. Replacing flexible hoses is $150 to $300, and it is the cheapest worthwhile thing on this list.
Tell us whether the damp follows the weather, and whether the meter moves with everything off. Those two answers do most of the diagnosis before we arrive.
Located with equipment, repaired properly, and the cause put in writing.
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