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Plumbers of New Mexico
Plumbing · New Mexico
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Slab Leak

A leak under concrete keeps running until somebody finds it, and it will undermine the ground below the slab well before anything shows on the surface.

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When this becomes an emergency

What a pro does

Confirming the leak is under the slab is the first step, since a supply line in an interior wall can produce almost the same signs. The plumber isolates sections of the system and watches pressure to see where the loss is. Location then comes from acoustic equipment and line tracing rather than from opening concrete and hoping. Slab-on-grade is the default across most New Mexico subdivisions built from the 1960s onward, which puts hot and cold runs in or under the pour where nobody can look at them. Copper is what usually fails. Water this hard is also chemically active against copper over long exposure, and the tubing thins from within until a pinhole opens up, which is why these leaks appear in houses where nothing was ever disturbed. On a well property the tell is different, because there's no monthly bill to flag the loss; instead the pump starts on its own at odd hours. When the location is confirmed the choice is between a targeted opening in the slab and rerouting the run overhead to abandon the buried section for good.

Frequently asked questions

Locating it, yes. Listening equipment, pressure isolation and line tracing narrow the spot down to a small area before anything gets cut, and sometimes the result is a decision to reroute instead of opening the floor at all.
Two things work on it. Water chemistry attacks the inside of the tubing over years, and contact with concrete or aggressive soil works on the outside. Either way the wall thins until pressure finds the weak point, and the failure has nothing to do with anything the homeowner did.
By listening to the pump. With no meter to read, the pressure tank becomes the diagnostic, and a pump cycling with every fixture closed says water is leaving the system somewhere. Isolating and testing sections of supply narrows down where.
It can, given time. Water running under a slab washes fines out of the soil supporting it, and ground that loses support unevenly lets the concrete move. That's why the time between noticing and locating matters more than the size of the leak.

Slab Leak?

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