1
The call
Tell him what you have seen and when it started. Pressure dropping on the boiler, a meter that turns overnight, a warm patch on a tiled floor. That decides what to test first.
Leak detection in Sawston
Charlie covers leak detection in Sawston with the camera, microphones and tracer gas in the van, and visits are usually booked within 24 to 48 hours.
No find, no fee
About 15 miles away
Insurance report written
Nothing opened blind
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
Sawston was a working village before it was a commuter one. The paper mill and the tannery brought rows of cottages and terraces along the High Street, and the estates behind them went up in the decades after the war. The estate houses have copper laid in solid floors, which corrodes where it touches the screed.
Cambridge Water supplies Sawston and the villages round it. The meter and the main in the road are theirs; the pipe from the boundary to your stop tap is yours. On the larger plots along the Babraham and Pampisford roads that pipe can be long, and a leak on it turns the meter long before it wets the lawn.
1
Tell him what you have seen and when it started. Pressure dropping on the boiler, a meter that turns overnight, a warm patch on a tiled floor. That decides what to test first.
2
Meter reading with all taps off, then a pressure test on the heating. Within a few minutes one of them has shown the loss, and the search is confined to that system.
3
Thermal imaging maps the pipework through the floor or wall. Acoustic listening or tracer gas then finds the break itself. Charlie marks it, photographs it and explains the opening up.
The camera shows temperature, not pipes, but a warm pipe or a cold wet patch tells you where the pipe is. It is the quickest way to cut a whole house down to one room.
Water under pressure leaving a pipe makes a sound. Ground microphones hear it through turf, paving and concrete, and we walk the line until the sound peaks.
A heating circuit is emptied and filled with a hydrogen and nitrogen mix. The gas comes out at the break and rises through screed, tiles or laminate to a probe on the surface.
A 1960s estate house behind the High Street had a warm patch in the dining room floor and a boiler that needed topping up weekly. The thermal camera showed the heating pipe running under the patch, and tracer gas placed the pinhole where the copper had corroded in the screed. On a plot along the Babraham road the meter was turning with the house shut off. The supply pipe was forty metres long, so we listened along it with the ground microphone and marked the leak under the gravel drive, a few metres in from the boundary. In Great Shelford a cottage had a ceiling stain under the bathroom, traced to a shower waste that had dropped off its trap.
Linton is the next village along the A1307 and Cambridge is 15 minutes north. Whittlesford, Pampisford, Duxford, Stapleford and Great Shelford are all part of a Sawston visit. Cambourne and Histon are on the far side of the city but still an easy run.
Trace and access cover pays for finding a hidden leak and for the damage caused in getting to it. Our report sets out the tests we ran, what the thermal camera and the gas showed, and exactly where the leak is, with photographs.
Phone 07897 020 680 and tell us what the house is doing.
Landline 01440 840 772. Email hello@completeleakdetection.co.uk.