I’m working on a website for a company that sells a leak detector/ alarm, and I’d like to illustrate how quickly a burst pipe, water heater leak, or sump pump failure can flood a room. I’m having a devil of a time finding numbers to cite, though - all I can find are a couple of vague generalities about leaks on other companies’ websites, and as you’d imagine I can’t exactly provide a link to the competition in order to cite my source. What I’m imagining is a sentence that says something along the lines of, “A burst pipe [or a quarter-inch hole in a pipe, whatever the calamity is] can leak XX gallons per minute - that’s water XX inches deep in an XX square foot room in an hour.” If I knew the gallons per minute I could do the math myself, but I can’t seem to find a good reference. And I know it depends on PSI and a number of factors, but I just need a good basic number to give a sense of the scope of the problem.
A garden hose does about 10 gallons per minute and that’s probably a good estimate for a completely burst pipe inside a house. (I know this one well because of my days managing an apartment complex with a pool that took 20,000 gallons and a spa with 500 gallons.)
Some other reference points I know: a low-flow shower head is typically 2 gallons per minute and most low-flow sink faucets aim for 1 gallon per minute.
And that depends on the flow rate of the sump inflow.
However a sump pump failure can flood a sub level home very rapidly. A battery powered backup sump pump is a must but your leak detector would be beneficial on that system.
You don’t have to have an hard fast numbers, all you have to do is give worst case scenarios when marketing. Keep it emotional, All that mold if you flood, bugs, ROT!
Thanks for the info, guys. Any ideas on where/ how to find citations for leak/ flood rates? Part of my marketing for my own business is based on my reputation as a writer of informative copy that gets sales results, so even if the client won’t be including the citation on their cite, I’d like to submit it with my copy so they can see the research backing up my claims. Also, from a marketing perspective, a claim like “A 10’ by 10’ utility room can have water 3 inches deep in a single hour - imagine the damage that can be done by the time you get home from work!” is a lot stronger than a claim like “A burst pipe can flood your home really fast!”
If you (or someone you know) has some basic soldering skills, this would be pretty easy to test. I would do two tests.
1)Get a piece of 1/4 or 1/2 inch copper pipe, cap off one end and put a garden hose connector on the other. Drill a hole of your choosing in the end near the cap. Put it in a bucket of a known volume and connect it to a garden hose. Time how long it takes to fill up and do the math.
2)Get a piece of 1/4 or 1/2 inch copper a few feet long. Cap one end, fill it with water and cap the other end. Now put it in your freezer for a few hours and wait for it to burst (it won’t make to big of a mess, but you could put it in a bag or wrap it in saran wrap). It’ll probably leave a tear in the copper about an inch or two long. Now let it melt, cut off one cap and install the garden hose and run the test from above.
I think test 2 would be interesting since it’s realistic, really does happen and if you have contact with your clients you could bring the pipe along and show them how quickly it leaks.
Also, doing this, you’ve got real data instead of something you found on the internet. I’m sure you could come up with other tests as well.
As for where to get some data, you might try talking to an insurance agent. They might be able to help you dig something up.
This site has some numbers that seem suitable for making ballpark calculations on cocktail napkins. As an example, 3/4" Schedule 40 PVC can flow about 23 gallons per minute or 1400 gallons per hour at normal household pressures, so that would pretty much be your worst-case scenario.
I think PVC and copper have similar flow characteristics, but old scaled-up galvanized steel would deliver less flow due to friction loss.
You might want to leave the sump pump out of this illustration. Unless the sump is refilling very fast the pump will just be re-pumping the same sump water over and over.
I was under the impression that the sump pump failure wasn’t due to a pipe leak (in the PVC drain) but that the motor itself failed and the crock was overflowing into the basement.
I get the feeling the OP is selling the type of sensors that you put on the floor of your basement that alert the homeowner when they notice water pooling.
As for illustrating how fast that can happen, I’m not sure there’s a good way to do that. In a heavy rain my sump pump might turn cycle on and off every 10 seconds. In a light rain it might not start until the next day and even then it might only click on once every 10 minutes.
Thanks, gotpasswords! That’s very much along the lines of what I’m looking for. Can I ask what search terms you used to find this data? I see right away that using “leak” may have been part of what got me such cruddy results - I was thinking that someone would have already used the data in a manner similar to what I was trying to do, so that’s what I was searching on, but I think that was a flawed assumption.
And Joey P, you’re right that that’s essentially what my client is selling, with a few extra bells and whistles. What I’m trying to do is add a sense of urgency & illustrate the potential extent of the problem to prospective customers.