Not to beat a dead horse, since papergirl is going to get outside help, the leak is not ncessarily under the slab (the worst case scenario). It can be anywhere between the meter (and the main valve) at the street and the house. In my case, it was under the front patio. I tried to shut off the valve before the pipes enter the house (to narrow down the area). After digging about six feet, I found it, but the handle to that valve was broken.
Papergirl, it should be an easy matter to determine which is your meter. If your house is on the right of the adjoining one, your meter will be on the right. If still unable to determine, ask your neighbor for cooperation. Shut off one and see if that’s it. If not, it is the other. Put on some rubber gloves and get rid of all that mud first. Although you can turn off the valve without that special tool (using a pair of pliers and a grasper), that tool makes it very easy, and it costs only about $8.
Some sewer repair companies offer a camera inspectrion of your home’s water pipes. They make, or find, an entry point and then have a kind of surgical camera on a pushes down stiff wire filming the inside of your water pipes. A (sometimes faulty) GPS on the camera enables you to find where your pipes are and where the leak is, if it is visible on camera inspection.
I had a camera inspection like that and it set me back about 200 dollars.
I had a very similar situation in a house I was renting a few years ago - to the point where I was almost convinced the leak had to be under the slab (though there was no evidence of it - no soggy yard, etc).
Turns out the water heater had an emergency release valve that would only trigger if the water in the tank got too hot. The point of it was to release the steam that would build up before the water heater tank would explode. This valve was old and faulty and got stuck open. The pipe itself led directly to a drain in the floor via copper pipe, so I never noticed the water flowing out. It was a fair amount of water.
Anyway - check out your water heater. See if there’s a pipe coming out from the side of the unit, towards the top, and connecting to a drain (some apparently just end and if you have a problem, the water goes over your floor - depends on the installer). Touch the pipe a couple feet away from the water heater (lightly and quickly, could be very hot). If it is hot, you may have hot water leaving your water heater and traveling out to the drain - and this could be the source of your mysterious leak. Finally figured out I needed to look here one day when it was really quiet in the house, I was the only one home and I heard water running through a pipe, so you may be able to hear the water running down the pipe as well.
The odd part about this that I could never figure out was that though I lost thousands of gallons of theoretically hot water, my gas bill (gas water heater) wasn’t unusually high, so it took a while to trigger on to this.
So I went out and got under the manhole cover and cleaned various items until I found my meter and the little red spinner. Went into the house and turned off the main which I eventually found next to the water heater. Went back out, the spinner is not spinning. To doublecheck, I turned my main back on, turned on a faucet, and rechecked…it was spinning then, as it should when I’m running water.
So, if I understand correctly–I don’t have a running leak under my slab, or anywhere from the meter to the house. Nor do I expect there to be a leak on the other side of the meter, as the arrow wasn’t spinning at all when my valves were off.
I’m looking with suspicion at the toilets again, then…they both need new guts and could be occasionally running (possibly for hours at a time) without my noticing.
Do I have this right so far?
The main should be next to the meter, and you need the special tool I mentioned to easily turn that off. What you probably turned off was the valve off the main that is next to the house. That was the valve which my handle was broken off, as I noted previously. So you know the problem is after that valve, but that does not preclude a leak in a pipe under the slab, which is the worst possible scenario. I would recommend that now you turn on the valve that you previously turned off and then turn off all the inside valves. Then check at the main to see if the red arrow is spinning. If it is, that is bad news. It means the leak is probably under the slab.
You would’ve noticed a toilet leak with the amount of leakage you described. In fact, that amount of leakage indicates something a lot more major than a toilet leak.
I’m not arguing, mind you…I just want to make sure I understand what I’m learning here…
But if I turn off the main valve inside the house (so all faucets etc are not on) and the arrow at the meter (out by the street) isn’t moving, wouldn’t that indicate that there is not water moving through the meter to my house/yard/underslab at all? I would think if there were a leak under the slab (before the inside main valve, I think all other piping is through the walls), water would still be moving through the meter.
It appears to run thusly:
Meter by street–>slab (copper lines it looks like, although that could just be the part I see)–>main valve in house–>faucets, toilets, etc
I shut off the main valve in the house and checked, then turned it back on and rechecked–no movement either time. Only when I turned on a faucet did the arrow move. I didn’t turn it off at the meter because there didn’t appear to be any water moving through it already.
Theoretically there could be a leak between the main valve and the faucets, but when I turned on the main valve in the house, the arrow still wasn’t moving. The only time it began moving was when I turned on a faucet.
Oh, now I see what barbitu8 is saying. I think we’re on the same page. I did essentially what you recommended–I was just thrown because my main valve is inside the waterheater closet instead of outside.
Looking more closely at the way the pipes are configured, I think the slab only covers a portion of the line, from the outside to the waterheater, then it comes aboveground and splits.
(I know water heater is 2 words…my spacebar is broken and I’m conserving spaces.)
The main valve is always next to the meter, near the street. The pipes run through the main valve (which could be shut off) and then continue on their way to your house. Before they enter your house, there is another shut-off valve, the handle to mine being broken. Then the pipes run into your house, wherein you can shut off individual valves.
Is it possible that the valve you turned was the water heater valve? If it is, you got a leak in the water heater.
No, the valve is in the water heater closet, but it turns off the water to the whole house. (I checked the faucets, etc.) I don’t think there is an outside shutoff, according to my repair guy who knows the neighborhood the shutoffs are by the water heater.
This valve is directly above the floor, where the copper line comes out of the slab. Above (downstream) of the valve, the pipe splits off and heads to various places like the washer, bathroom, etc.
I didn’t shut off the valve at the meter.
The size leak you are describing may be too small to see the spinner move. Turn off all water-using devices in the house and note the position of the spinner. Then, come back in 15 minutes and see if it has moved.
If you want to get an idea of the amount of water you are losing, put an 8oz glass under the faucet, and set the stream of water to fill it in around 3 minutes. If you do that, then you can go out and see if the spinner is moving significantly. If it is, then you probably don’t have a leak - you have a water thief, or an appliance with a sticky valve (like a clothes washer or a dish washer).
I’ll do this tomorrow. And I need to call the water company again, too–I’m not sure how far behind their billing cycle runs, but it’s possible that I’m just now getting the late summer/drought bills, when I was watering the garden more.
FWIW - I always know when I have a blown “dripper” on my irrigation system when I get my water bill and it’s astronomical. My irrigation mostly runs at night, so it can take me a long time to actually see a problem.
You are doing good, papergirl. I’d call the water company and tell them you don’t believe the bill you got and they should come check the meter again because your bill shot up but your usage didn’t.
One should never say “always” when discussing municipal water systems. Many systems are incredibly old, and have escaped the modernizations that happened on the electric and gas distribution systems (both of which HAD to be upgraded due to changes in the underlying product being delivered *).
You can’t even assert that there’s always a meter - parts of New York City didn’t meter water as recently as 15 years ago, and there are probably still a few overlooked ones.
On my property, the house line from the feeder in the street (most street lines are actually distribution feeders, not “mains”) was a lead pipe that went under the street, the driveway, and then under the slab in the basement and came out sort of in the middle of the basement. There were shutoff valves on both sides of the meter, but none outside except for the tap on the feeder, which was buried in the street.
Around 10 years ago, the company (that my city sold the water system to) came around to replace the meters with ones that could be read remotely. The tech easily shut off the valve on my side of the meter, but had a hard time with the one on “their” side. He eventually got it most of the way closed and replaced the meter, but when he turned it back on the valve stem was dripping. His initial response was “not our problem”, but he eventually agreed to unscrew the stem nut and put some packing in and re-tighten it.
Thinsg went fine for another five years, though the water pressure kept getting lower (with no corresponding usage on the meter). Eventually I called the utility and they came right out, determined that there was a leak in the line from the street to my house, dug up the street, turned off the tap valve, cut the house line, and filled in the hole. Leaving me with no water. On the Thursday of the upcoming July 4th weekend.
$7,000 later, I had a new 1" copper feeder to the street and a shutoff valve in the driveway. My homeowner’s insurance refused the claim. Grrr…
For the curious - DC and 25Hz AC power were replaced with 60Hz, and natural gas replaced town gas.
Sounds like the houses main shutoff valve. You should check this overnight. Shut that valve off, check the meter before you go to bed and then check it in the morning to see if the numbers advance because of a slow leak.
There are 2 possible slab leaks. one going to the main house shut off. You can also have pipes coming FROM the house shut-off valve and going back down into the slab to surface somewhere else on the slab. Small slab houses often have all the plumbing on opposing walls which means it’s all in the walls. That’s your best scenario but even then you could have a leak behind the tub wall that drains down into the slab never to be seen as a puddle because the drain lines sit in gravel. I just worked on a house like this with a leak as described. you would only see it if there was an access panel to the tub area. In this case the service door was hidden behind kitchen cabinets and the cabinets had to be pulled out to work on it.
Our first two water bills in our new house were a lot higher than I expected so I called the water company and they agreed that we probably had a bad leak. And we have two acres with lots of sprinklers and what have you. There was one bad wet spot down below the house, but nothing we could find to be causing it.
We finally called a service that comes out and finds the leak for you somehow. The guy told us it could be very costly to find, but we just didn’t know what else to do. He agreed to come out and narrow it down for us for $125.00 We never would have found it without his help though. The leak was nowhere close to the only wet spot we found. It ended up being below the actual meter, but because our property slopes down, all the water was pooling in this one low spot.
Hope you find the problem soon. It’s so expensive.
You have had some good advice.
You state that with all water shut off in the house your meter is not turning. My meter will turn with a extreamly small flow.
From what you have said it is possable that your line comes from the meter under the slab into the house hot water closet. I would assume then the water goes back down lunder the slab the the various parts of the house and the up.
I have had three leaks under the slab of my house. There was no signs no water puddles or wet carpets. I found the leaks by having American Leak detection find them. They use sound detection to locate the leak. In remodeling my kitchen I had ran new lines to the kitchen and extended the lines over the downstairs bathroom and stubbed them off. The third leak Il heard with out any assistance. So I just open the bathroom wall and cieling connected the new lines to the old lines and cut off the lines under going under the slab.
Another thing that you have not said that you have done is take a meter reading and compare it to your bill. Are the readings close? If you do not know how to read the meter call the water company and have them show you.
Now for my advice. With all water off in the house check the meter to see if it is turning. If not note time and then take a meter reading. Take meter readings in the morning and again at night. This will tell you if you are using a lot of water or not. And it will tell you if it is all day long or a night or day thing. Right now you are only guessing if you are really using a lot of water.
All good advice…I’ve learned so much! The good news, I think, is that I found out that the pipes are only under the slab as far as the water heater (that main valve, I mean). Then they branch off into the walls. That’s good because I always assumed they were all under the slab.
ETA: Except the kitchen sink. Looks like that must go back under the slab, probably.
Anyway, I have a much better understanding of where my water lines are!
It won’t help solve your problem, but that valve is not a “main valve.” It is the house’s shutoff valve, but usually when one refers to the “main valve,” reference is had to the valve by the meter, which is the main valve, whether it runs off the main pipe or a feeder pipe from the main pipe.
As others noted there are professionals, such as American Leak Co., that can find the leak by soundings if you do, indeed, have a hidden pipe that is leaking. I used them to find my leak under the front patio. It is going to be an expensive procedure, several hundreds of dollars to find the leak, and several hundreds more to repair it. Good luck.