The meter creeps overnight
Turn every tap off before bed and read the meter at the boundary. If the dial has moved by morning, water is leaving the supply pipe somewhere between the road and your kitchen.
Leak detection in Cambridgeshire
Charlie covers every PE and CB postcode, so leak detection in Yaxley, Peterborough, Wisbech or Sawston is one call away. Thermal imaging, acoustic listening and tracer gas find the leak without pulling your house apart.
No find, no fee
Visits within 24 to 48 hours
Reports your insurer accepts
Phone answered 24/7
Tell us what you have noticed and where. We ring you back to talk it through. No find, no fee.
No find, no fee
24/7 enquiries
Non-invasive methods
Reports for insurance claims
Cambridgeshire is a long county for a leak engineer. Peterborough sits in the far north, Cambridge in the south, and the Fens between them have some of the longest private supply pipes anywhere. Charlie plans his week around that spread, from Sawtry to Linton.
The housing changes as much as the distances. Cambridge has Victorian terraces with lead and iron pipework still in the ground. Peterborough has 1970s township estates and the new Hampton development south of the city. On the Fens around Wisbech and March, houses stand on peat that shrinks in dry summers, which stresses buried pipes and shows as a meter that never stops.
Most of the county is supplied by Anglian Water. Cambridge and the villages close to it are supplied by Cambridge Water. Either way, the pipe from the stop tap at the boundary to your house is yours to maintain, and that is where most Cambridgeshire leaks turn out to be.
Turn every tap off before bed and read the meter at the boundary. If the dial has moved by morning, water is leaving the supply pipe somewhere between the road and your kitchen.
A sealed heating system that needs topping up each week is losing water. On the newer estates in Cambourne and Hampton that often means a pipe joint under a screed floor.
A dark patch spreading across a solid floor, or skirting boards that stay cold and damp, usually sits above a leaking pipe rather than beside it.
On the Fens a green strip across a brown lawn in August is a reliable sign of a cracked supply pipe. It is the first thing we check on a rural job.
1
Charlie asks what you have noticed, where the water is appearing and whether the meter or the boiler gauge is moving. That tells him which equipment to load for the drive.
2
On site he isolates the supply and heating in turn, so he knows which system is losing water before a floorboard is touched. Half the job is proving where the leak is not.
3
Thermal imaging, acoustic listening and tracer gas are used in whatever order the property calls for. A Fen bungalow on a long private pipe needs a different approach from a Cambridge terrace.
4
The leak point is marked on the floor or wall and photographed. You get a written report with the method, the evidence and the location, which is what your insurer wants to see.
An infrared camera shows warm water from a heating pipe, or the cold line of a mains leak, through plaster, tiles and screed. It maps the pipe run so the hole goes in the right place.
Ground microphones pick up the hiss of water escaping under pressure. On the long buried supply pipes serving Fen farms and smallholdings this narrows a leak to a metre or two before anyone digs.
A safe hydrogen and nitrogen mix is put into a drained heating or underfloor circuit. It escapes at the leak and rises through the floor, where a detector picks it up above the exact point.
On the Fens near Chatteris a farmhouse had a meter that never stopped and a green strip across a brown lawn. The private supply pipe ran over a hundred metres on peat, so we walked it with the ground microphone in stages and found the joint that had pulled apart as the ground shrank. In Peterborough a 1970s township house had a boiler losing pressure and a warm patch in the hall. The thermal camera picked out the line and tracer gas placed the split in a copper pipe under the slab. In a Cambridge terrace with lead and copper joined under the front path, the ground microphone found a leaking joint a metre from the house.
Each town below has its own page with the villages around it, the local water company and the leaks we have found nearby. If your village is not listed, ring anyway. We cover every PE and CB postcode in the county.
Most home insurance policies in the county include trace and access cover. It pays for finding the leak and for making good whatever had to be opened to reach it, separately from the repair itself. Our written report sets out the method, the photographs and thermal images, and the exact leak position, which is what your insurer asks for.
All of it. Peterborough, Wisbech and Sawtry are at the far end of the county and we go there every month. We group the northern jobs together, so you may be offered a day when we are already heading north, normally within 24 to 48 hours.
Anglian Water and Cambridge Water are responsible for the pipe up to the boundary of your property, usually the stop tap in the pavement. Everything from there to the house is yours. We tell you which side the leak is on, and trace it if it is yours.
Yes. Solid floors are where tracer gas earns its keep. The circuit is drained and filled with gas, which rises through concrete and screed at the leak point. We mark the spot so the repair needs only one small opening in the floor.
If we come out, run the full survey and cannot locate your leak, you do not pay for the visit. It rarely happens, because the first tests prove which system is losing water before tracing begins, but the promise stands on every job.
Yes. We trace leaks in shops, offices, pubs, farms and light industrial units across the county, and can work early or late to avoid your trading hours. Commercial pipe runs are longer, so the first isolation tests matter even more.
Describe what you have noticed and we will tell you whether a visit is needed and when.
Landline 01440 840 772. Email hello@completeleakdetection.co.uk.