
Slab Leak
Water escaping under a slab has nowhere to go but sideways through the soil, and on ground this wet it will undermine the pad long before you see it inside, so get it located quickly.
When this becomes an emergency
- A warm spot underfoot on a tiled floor with nothing heating it.
- The meter dial creeping with every fixture in the house closed.
- The sound of running water in a quiet room at night.
- Flooring lifting or a baseboard staying damp along one wall.
What a pro does
On a slab leak the plumber's job is finding it without breaking concrete twice. He isolates the water heater from the cold side to work out which run is losing, then uses acoustic listening gear and pressure testing to narrow the spot to a small area of floor. Guesswork is expensive here in a very literal way. Louisiana slabs sit on soil that hardly ever stops moving. Alluvial clay swells with a high water table and shrinks in a dry spell, and a slab that flexes puts stress on any supply line cast into it or run beneath it, particularly at bends and old fittings. That's why a leak here is often less about a corroded pipe and more about a pipe that got tired of being bent. Once located, there are two roads. A single failure in an otherwise sound system gets a small opening in the slab, a repair and a patch. A system with age on it, or one on ground that keeps working the pipe, often gets rerouted instead, running new line overhead or through walls and abandoning the section under the concrete so the same thing can't happen again.
Frequently asked questions
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