Plumbers in Greensboro, NC

A leak costs more than money here

Greensboro draws its water from reservoirs rather than a large river, and that makes the supply more sensitive to a long dry spell than a river city’s would be. Restrictions have been a real part of life here during past droughts.

Which changes what a hidden leak means. Elsewhere it is a line on a bill. Here it is also water going into the ground during a season when the city may be asking everyone to use less, and it can push a household over a threshold without anyone using more than usual.

That is a good argument for checking periodically rather than waiting to be surprised.

The test costs nothing. Turn off everything that uses water, including the irrigation controller and any ice maker. Note the meter reading. Come back an hour later without using anything.

If the figure has changed, water is leaving the system somewhere on your side.

Halving the search with one valve

Once the meter has confirmed a leak, the next step is the one people skip, and it saves the most time.

Close the irrigation supply valve on its own and run the same test again.

If the meter stops, the leak is in the irrigation system, out in the yard, and nothing inside the house needs investigating at all. If it keeps moving, irrigation is ruled out and the search moves indoors.

Two minutes of turning a valve removes most of a property from consideration.

Above ground the irrigation signs are worth knowing too: a patch that stays damp when everything around it has dried out, or a strip of grass noticeably greener and growing faster than the rest. In a hot Piedmont summer that contrast is unmistakable, and it usually sits near the leak even if not directly over it.

The leak that makes no sound

Before paying anyone to look for anything, check the toilets. This is the most commonly missed cause of a high bill anywhere.

A worn flapper lets water pass continuously from the cistern into the pan. Because it runs down the inside of the bowl, there is no drip, no puddle and often no audible sound. Meanwhile it can waste a very large volume over the course of a month.

The test takes twenty minutes and no tools. Put a few drops of food colouring into the cistern, not the bowl, and do not flush. Come back later and look in the pan. Colour in the bowl means water is passing the flapper.

Run it on every toilet in the house. The part costs very little and it is frequently the entire answer.

Old houses, and a different kind of winter

Fisher Park, College Hill, Aycock and Glenwood have housing around a century old, and the characteristic complaint there is not a leak at all: it is water pressure that has been declining for years with no fault ever found.

That is galvanised steel supply pipe corroding from the inside, with the corrosion building as a rough layer that narrows the bore. Nothing has broken, so nothing gets found, and no repair improves it. Replacing the affected runs is the only thing that restores flow.

Winter here is a different risk from a northern city’s. The ground does not freeze deep, so burial depth advice largely does not apply. What happens instead is ice storms, and ice storms bring down power lines.

A house with no heating for several days is how a pipe freezes in this climate. If an outage looks likely to last, the safe move is to shut the water off at the main and open the taps to drain the system down. Water that is not in the pipe cannot freeze in it.