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A few questions first
How long has the boiler been losing pressure, does the meter move at night, where is the damp. Your answers decide which equipment is loaded and how long the visit will take.
Leak detection in Sawtry
Charlie arrives in Sawtry with thermal imaging, listening equipment and tracer gas, and finds the leak before any floor or ground is touched.
No find, no fee
Report sent for claims
One hole, not a trench
24 to 48 hour visits
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
Sawtry grew from a village on the Great North Road into something closer to a small town, mostly in the 1960s and after. The estates that ring the old village green are where most of the housing is, and most of it has heating pipework buried in solid floors, which is where a slow pressure loss usually ends up.
Anglian Water is the supplier here, and the ground is heavy clay on the hill with fen peat a mile east. Clay holds a supply pipe firmly but cracks in a dry summer, and that is when old joints start to weep. Peat moves with the water table and pulls on pipes laid across it.
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How long has the boiler been losing pressure, does the meter move at night, where is the damp. Your answers decide which equipment is loaded and how long the visit will take.
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A meter test tells him whether the mains supply is losing water. A pressure test on the heating tells him whether that is. One shows the loss and the other is ruled out.
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The thermal camera finds the room, acoustic listening or tracer gas finds the point. Charlie marks it with a pen on the floor or wall, takes photographs and writes it up.
Heating pipes in a concrete floor show through carpet or laminate as warm lines on the camera. A leak shows as heat spreading away from the line.
The noise of water forcing its way out of a pipe carries through clay and concrete. Ground microphones and probes pick it up and the loudest reading is over the leak.
Where the heating leak is too small to hear, the circuit is drained and filled with a safe hydrogen mix. The gas escapes at the fault and rises through the floor to the detector.
A 1960s house on one of the estates round the green had a boiler dropping to zero every few days and a hall floor that felt warm underfoot. Thermal imaging showed the heating pipe under the laminate and tracer gas confirmed a corroded joint in the screed, so one small square was opened. A farmhouse out towards Glatton had a water bill that had doubled over the summer. The supply pipe ran across a paddock from the lane, and the ground microphone found the split where the clay had cracked around an old joint. In the old village a cottage with a damp kitchen wall turned out to have a supply pipe weeping under the back step rather than rising damp.
Huntingdon and Godmanchester are the next stops down the A1 and A14, with St Ives beyond them. Yaxley and Peterborough are north, and Ramsey is across the fen to the east. Glatton, Conington, Holme and Great Gidding are all covered on a Sawtry booking.
Where your home insurance includes trace and access, the cost of finding the leak and of the opening up to reach it is normally covered. Our report gives the insurer the test results, the thermal images, the method and the marked position of the leak. It is the document the claims handler asks for first.
Yes. Sawtry is in Huntingdonshire, and we do leak detection in Cambridgeshire from one end of the county to the other. It is an hour or so each way, so we group it with Huntingdon or Peterborough jobs where we can.
That is where we come in. Anglian Water’s responsibility ends at the boundary and yours starts there. We trace your supply pipe from the meter with the ground microphone and marks the leak, so the repair is one hole rather than a trench.
Yes. Underfloor heating is a long loop of plastic pipe in screed, and tracer gas is the right tool for it. The loop is isolated, drained, filled with gas, and the probe reads where it surfaces.
We take calls 24 hours a day and book visits for a time that suits you. For a Sawtry job that usually means a morning slot on the way north or an afternoon on the way back.
Then you pay nothing for the detection. The tests will have shown that the mains and the heating are holding, and we will tell you what we think is really causing the problem.
Charlie answers 07897 020 680 himself, so ring whenever you notice the problem.
Landline 01440 840 772. Email hello@completeleakdetection.co.uk.