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Isolation
The stop tap is closed and the meter watched, then the heating gauge is checked. Charlie knows within 20 minutes whether the leak is on the supply pipe or in the heating.
Leak detection in Soham
Soham is on the route Charlie takes to Ely. Soham leak detection for the old town, the bypass estates and the Fen villages to Wicken and Isleham.
No find, no fee
40 minutes away
Supply and heating leaks
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
Soham is an old Fen town that has grown fast. The centre has brick cottages and Victorian terraces along the High Street, with 1970s and 1980s estates behind them and new housing on the Ely side, where underfloor heating is common.
The town stands on a low clay ridge with peat all round. Houses on the edges, towards Soham Lode, Barway and Wicken, are on ground that shrinks in summer and pulls pipe joints apart. A pipe fine for decades can start losing water after a dry August.
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The stop tap is closed and the meter watched, then the heating gauge is checked. Charlie knows within 20 minutes whether the leak is on the supply pipe or in the heating.
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A pipe locator and the thermal camera map where the pipe actually runs under the garden or the floor, so the search follows the pipe and not the damp.
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Acoustic listening for the supply pipe, tracer gas for the heating loop. The leak is narrowed to a hand-sized spot, chalked on the surface and photographed for the written report.
Maps the heating pipes under solid floors in the estate houses and the underfloor loops in the newer houses on the Ely side, showing where heat spreads from a leak.
For the long supply pipes serving houses on the Fen edge roads. The ground microphone is moved along the pipe until the leak is loudest, and that is where the ground is opened.
The heating or underfloor circuit is drained and charged with safe gas. The detector finds where it surfaces through the floor, directly over the leak, so the floor is opened once.
A new house on the Ely side of town had underfloor heating that kept losing pressure, and the builder had already been back twice. We tested each loop at the manifold, found the one that would not hold, and tracer gas put the fault at a kink near the patio door, so one tile came up. A Victorian terrace on the High Street had a water bill that had doubled, and the meter turned with every tap off. The ground microphone traced the supply pipe under the front path to a joint by the gate. Out at Wicken a bungalow on the peat had a damp patch in the lounge floor, which the camera showed was a heating pipe and not the ground.
From Soham we cover Fordham, Wicken, Isleham, Barway, Stuntney, Chippenham and Snailwell, and carries on to Ely and Littleport in one direction and Burwell and Newmarket in the other direction.
If your policy includes trace and access, the cost of locating the leak and reinstating what was opened to reach it is claimable separately from the repair. Our report from a Soham visit gives the insurer the isolation tests, the thermal and photographic evidence and the marked leak point for the claim.
Check your water company’s website for a reported outage in Soham first, and ask a neighbour whether they have water. If only your house is off, a burst on your own supply pipe can drop the pressure to nothing. Ring us to talk it through.
On the Fen edge around Soham, yes. Shrinking peat pulls away from buried pipes and opens joints, and the garden sinking is a sign of the same movement. The meter test shows whether water is being lost and acoustic listening finds where.
Yes. The loop is drained, charged with tracer gas and walked with a detector from above the floor. The leak is marked to within a hand’s width, so the repair is one small opening in the screed rather than a whole room.
The homeowner, from the boundary stop tap inward. The water company looks after the main and the pipe up to that stop tap. We tell you which side the leak is on before starting a trace, so you are not paying to find theirs.
Soham is on the run to Ely, so a visit is usually booked within 24 to 48 hours and sometimes the next morning, with the travel included in the visit.
Tell him what the meter and gauge are doing and he will book the next Ely run.
Landline 01440 840 772. Email hello@completeleakdetection.co.uk.