When it works
When listening isthe right tool.
Listening works on one case only: a line under pressure losing water right now.
01
You hear water with taps shut
Late at night when the house goes quiet you can hear water running with every tap closed. That is the same sound we follow, except the probe hears it on the pipe instead of in the room.
02
A faint tremor in the tile
Put your hand flat on the tile above the pipe run. Sometimes you feel a faint tremor, because water escaping under pressure shakes the pipe and the bedding around it.
03
The sound rises near one spot
Walk the length of the pipe run and if the sound rises at one place and falls off past it, you are close to the opening. The sound is loudest directly over where the water leaves.
04
It stops when the valve closes
Close the main valve, and if the sound fades the source is a pressurised line. If it keeps going unchanged, it is not coming from the supply at all, and that is a different job.
Quick card
The service, briefly.
Service
Acoustic leak listening on a live water line
What it needs
A line under pressure, and a quiet space
Listening points
Valves, fittings, taps, the meter and the floor above
It will not find
An unpressurised drain, or damp wicking up from the slab
Coverage
Every area of Kuwait, houses, flats and complexes
Hours
Daily, 6:00 in the morning to 12:00 midnight
How we listen
Four steps on thesound.
The order is what turns a sound into a location instead of a guess.
We quieten it and charge the line
We stop the washing machine and any noisy unit nearby, and make sure the line is open and pressurised, because listening to an empty line gives nothing.
We listen at contact points
We start at valves, taps and the meter, because metal carries the sound further than the bedding does. Whichever one hears it strongest tells us which branch to walk.
We walk the run on the floor
Then we go down onto the tile itself above the pipe run, listening point by point at short spacings, noting where the sound rises and where it drops away.
We come back to the peak
We listen again on both sides of the highest reading to be sure it is the peak and not an echo, then mark that point on the tile.
The sound itself
Why escaping watermakes a sound.
Water inside a pipe moves quietly because the pressure around it is balanced. Once there is a small opening, water leaves it at speed and strikes the bedding and the pipe wall, and that impact is the sound. The smaller the opening and the higher the pressure, the clearer the sound and the easier it is to follow.
The sound travels two ways: along the pipe wall itself, and out through the bedding and the concrete around the opening. The pipe route carries further and cleaner, which is why we listen at valves and taps first. They are bolted to the metal, so they can carry a leak that is nowhere near the room we are standing in.
The bedding does the opposite. It absorbs the sound, more so the deeper the pipe sits and the looser the fill around it. A deep pipe under a thick floor gives a weaker signal, so we need more quiet and closer listening points. Noise in the house or the street flattens the peak and makes every reading look the same.
There are cases where listening will not work, and they have to be said at the start. A drain line carries no pressure, so it seeps quietly and produces no steady sound. Damp wicking up from the slab, or coming down from a floor above, has no sound at all. For those we fall back on isolating the lines and watching the meter, or on checking the tank itself.
External links for referenceMinistry of Electricity and Water (water meters and supply)
Questions
Asked aboutlistening.
The sound we are after is very faint next to the noise of a house. A washing machine, an air conditioner and street traffic all cover it and make every point read the same. Quiet is what lets the difference between one point and the next show, and that difference is the location.
Usually yes, because the sound carries along the pipe wall much further than it does through the ground. We listen at the valve and at the meter, and if the meter hears it louder than anything inside, the opening is on the outside run.
Close the main valve and listen. If the sound fades away, it is the supply network, and leave the valve shut until we get there so the loss does not grow. If the sound carries on unchanged, leave the valve open and tell us on the call.
Listening pins the place on the surface accurately. Depth is worked out from the pipe run itself and the floor build up over it. We give you the point on the tile and what to expect beneath it before anything is opened.
We will, but one after another. The bigger leak drowns out the smaller one, so we take the loudest first, deal with it, then listen across the same network again to be sure the meter has fully stopped.