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- Commercial premises: water pooling in the entrance foyer
Hidden cold water leak under a concrete floor, found without lifting the whole ground floor
Water was pooling on the foyer floor and the office flooring was discolouring. Thermal imaging, a pressure test and tracer gas put the leak under the kitchen threshold, where ADI dug down and repaired it.
What was happening
Water damage had spread across the ground floor. Once the carpet was pulled back, water was pooling on the concrete floor of the entrance foyer. Paint was flaking in the foyer, the downstairs toilet and the kitchen, and the wooden flooring in the office area had started to discolour. Damage on that scale suggested the leak had been running for some time.
What the engineer did
The engineer moisture mapped the ground floor walls and floors, which read high throughout. Thermal imaging in the foyer and kitchen picked out the route of the cold water pipe and showed an anomaly at kitchen floor level. A pressure test on the cold water pipe dropped, confirming a live leak. Tracer gas was then put into the cold pipe in the kitchen at 2 bar, and the gas sensor found large concentrations at the threshold between the kitchen and the foyer.
What was found
The leak was on the cold water pipework beneath the kitchen floor, right at the junction with the entrance foyer. Thermal imaging, the pressure drop and the tracer gas readings all pointed to the same spot, so the excavation could go in one place.
What happened next
Access was made through the concrete and kitchen tiles, the fault was exposed and ADI repaired it with 15 mm plastic pipe and a straight connector. The damaged rooms still needed stripping out and drying before reinstatement and redecoration, and knowing exactly where the leak had been meant those works could be planned properly.
If you look after an office building
Water travels a long way under a concrete floor before it shows, so the wettest-looking room is not always where the pipe failed. Finding the exact spot first means one hole in the floor, and lets the drying and redecoration be planned around it.
More case studies
School: a hissing classroom and a saturated field
The meter was passing a litre every five seconds and one classroom was hissing. Isolation, tracer gas and acoustic listening found a leak on the buried pipe to a single desk tap, which ADI capped off and pressure tested.
Care home: a spinning meter and a soaked kitchen floor
The meter was spinning fast and the kitchen floor was saturated. The leak was too big to pressure test, so thermal imaging and acoustics found it instead, and a second leak turned up once the first was repaired.