Your Water Bill Spiked. We Find the Leak Without Wrecking the House.
Somewhere in your plumbing, a pressurized line is losing water around the clock — and so far the only evidence is a number on your utility bill. We locate leaks with a meter test, a pressure gauge, an acoustic microphone, and a thermal camera, and we put an X on the wall before anything gets cut. Call or text us at 405-519-1868. Oklahoma State License #190465.
Match Your Symptom to the Test That Proves It
| Symptom | What It Usually Means | How We Prove It |
|---|---|---|
| Water bill jumped, nothing looks wet | A pressurized supply line bleeding around the clock | Meter low-flow test, then pressure isolation |
| Meter dial creeping with every fixture off | A leak in the yard service line — or inside the house | Split test at the house shutoff valve |
| Warm patch on the floor | A hot-water line leaking under the slab | Thermal imaging, then slab leak repair — never a jackhammer on a hunch |
| Ceiling stain under an upstairs bathroom | Tub drain, wax ring, or a supply fitting | Controlled flow test — drain leaks show only when the fixture runs; supply leaks never stop |
| Toilet hisses or refills on its own | A flapper or fill valve bleeding tank water into the bowl | Dye-tablet test |
| Musty smell, soft baseboard, bubbling paint | A pinhole or failed fitting behind the drywall | Acoustic listening plus a moisture meter |
You've Checked Every Faucet Twice. The Bill Went Up Anyway.
You walked the house with a flashlight. You opened every vanity cabinet, felt along the supply lines, stared at the ceilings. Everything is dry, and the bill still climbed.
Here's the mechanical reality. The leaks you can find by looking are mostly drain leaks, and drains only leak while water is moving through them. A pressurized supply line is a different animal. It pushes water out of its smallest failure point every second of every day — a pinhole in copper, a compression fitting whose rubber O-rings hardened and cracked after years of chlorinated city water, a toilet flapper seeping tank water into the bowl so quietly you'd never hear it standing in the room. Sixty days of that is two ugly bills and zero puddles.
So the bill isn't lying, and your eyes aren't failing you. The leak is hiding behind half an inch of drywall, under a slab, or inside a toilet tank. Finding it is a measurement job, not a guessing game.
Most people watch a strange bill for a cycle or two hoping it corrects itself — a problem with no puddle is easy to put off, and nobody here is going to scold you for it. Here are the two sizes this job comes in. Caught early, the usual bill-spike culprit is a toilet flapper or one failed fitting: a rubber part and a single patch-sized opening. Left running long enough, the same leak adds soft baseboards and a repaint to the ticket, with another of those bills arriving each month in between. Small part now, drywall project later. The lowest-commitment way to find out which one you have: text a photo of your water bill or your meter to 405-519-1868 and we'll tell you straight whether it's worth a visit.
The Exploratory Demolition Racket
There's a way of "finding" leaks you need to watch out for: cut first, diagnose later.
It goes like this. A technician shows up, listens to your story for ninety seconds, and starts opening wall cavities — plural. By mid-afternoon your water is off, your hallway looks like a salvage yard, and the same person who created the mess explains that, for liability reasons, none of it can go back together. The only path forward, conveniently, is the full repipe quote already on the clipboard. Once your house is open and your water is off, every option except theirs is gone. That isn't diagnosis. That's drywall removal with extra steps.
We work in the opposite order. The diagnosis is finished before any destructive access begins — static pressure testing, acoustic listening, thermal confirmation — so the failure gets isolated to inches, not rooms. You see the gauge readings. You hear where the microphone gets loud. Then you approve one cut, sized for the repair, and only then does a blade come out.
Three Tests Before One Cut
Test one: the water meter. Every fixture off. Then we watch the meter's low-flow indicator — the small triangle or star-shaped dial that registers flow too faint to move the main sweep hand. (Fair warning about the meter box at the curb: there will be spiders, possibly a toad. We'll handle that part.) If the indicator moves, water is leaving the system. Then we split the search in half: close the house shutoff valve and look again. Still moving means the leak sits in the buried service line between the meter and the house — that's a water line repair conversation. Stopped means it's indoors, and the hunt just got smaller.
Test two: pressure isolation. A pressure gauge threads onto a hose bibb and gives us a static reading. Code caps pressure at any fixture at 80 PSI, and a pressure-reducing valve is required when the supply runs higher — pressure above that line chews through fill valves, flex connectors, and appliance solenoids. Then we isolate. Close the water heater's cold inlet and watch the gauge: if the pressure decay stops, the leak lives on the hot side, and we just eliminated half the house without touching a wall. Working shutoff valves let us shrink the search further, leg by leg.
Test three: sound and heat. Pressurized water escaping a pipe makes a constant hiss, and an acoustic ground microphone amplifies that hiss through drywall, tile, even concrete — the pitch shifts with pipe material and pressure. A thermal imaging camera reads the temperature signature a hot-water leak paints across a wall or floor. And here's the honest part: a thermal camera sees temperature, not water, so we confirm every suspect spot with a moisture meter before a saw touches anything. When the cut finally happens, it's one patch-sized access opening at the failure point — not an excavation.
If the evidence points under the slab, we stop and walk you through your slab leak repair options before anything touches concrete. Under-slab work is its own discipline, and you should choose the approach with the test results sitting in front of you.
Parts That Quit Quietly: A Maintenance Clock
Most hidden leaks aren't dramatic failures. They're small rubber and brass parts aging out on a schedule nobody tracks.
- Toilet flappers. Chlorine tank tablets eat rubber from the inside. Drop a dye tablet in the tank twice a year; if color reaches the bowl without a flush, the flapper is bleeding. It's the most boring diagnosis in plumbing, and we'll happily give it to you — the fix is a rubber part, not a project. If the tank internals are past saving, a toilet rebuild is still an hour's work, not a new fixture.
- O-rings and cartridges. Compression fittings and faucet cartridges ride on rubber O-rings that harden and crack with age and chlorine exposure. A slow drip under the sink becomes a steady leak inside the wall.
- Flexible supply lines. Code stops a fixture supply at 30 inches from its connection point for a reason — over-length flex lines kink, choke flow, and fail by hydraulic fatigue. Glance at the braided lines under your sinks: rust bloom on a crimp ferrule is a warning, not a decoration.
- Pressure. If the static reading creeps past 80 PSI, the code answer is a pressure-reducing valve. Unregulated pressure forces water past fill-valve floats, slams washing-machine solenoids shut hard enough to rattle pipe straps loose inside the walls, and shortens the life of every rubber seal in the system.
- Isolation valves. Exercise them once a year. We replaced a Manabloc manifold for a metro homeowner whose old unit was leaking and whose isolation valves had quit working — the new manifold shuts off hot or cold to any single fixture in the house. A seized valve doesn't just slow a repair; it wrecks the cleanest diagnostic move we have.
Receipts From the Field
"Delawn came out and fixed a water leak I had in the wall. He was very knowledgeable and he left the area cleaner than what he found it. They are also honest and affordable."
"Used Ultimate for 2 pipe leaks now. They do high quality work, offer very reasonable prices, are timely, friendly and willing to explain everything they do so a non-plumber can understand. They worked with our Home Warranty Company as well. Zeek and Gage are the best!"
That second one is the whole point. If a plumber can't explain where the leak is and how they know, they haven't found it — they've started cutting.
FAQ
Why is my water bill suddenly so high with no visible leak?
Because the leaks that move real water are pressurized supply leaks, and those run 24 hours a day without leaving a puddle. A seeping toilet flapper or a pinhole in a buried line pushes water out continuously while every visible surface stays dry. Start with a dye tablet in each toilet tank, then check the meter's low-flow indicator with every fixture off. If that dial moves, call or text us at 405-519-1868 and we'll isolate it.
Why is my water meter spinning when nothing is running?
Water is leaving the system somewhere past the meter — that dial is the most honest witness on the property. Close your house shutoff valve and look again. If the indicator keeps moving, the leak is in the buried service line between the meter and the house. If it stops, the leak is indoors. That one split cuts the search area in half before a single tool comes off the truck.
How do you find a leak behind a wall without cutting it open?
Pressure isolation first, then sound, then heat. A gauge on the hose bibb and your shutoff valves tell us hot side or cold side. An acoustic microphone narrows the hiss to a stretch of wall. A thermal camera and a moisture meter confirm the exact spot. Only then do we cut — one opening at the failure point, sized for the repair instead of the search.
Does acoustic leak detection actually work?
Yes — on pressurized lines, which is where it matters. Water forcing its way through a small opening under pressure makes a constant hiss, and a ground microphone amplifies it through drywall, tile, and slab. The honest limitation: it does nothing for drain leaks, because drains aren't pressurized. For those we run controlled flow tests instead — fill the tub, release it, watch what the line does.
Can a toilet leak without making any sound?
Yes, and silent flapper seepage is one of the most common reasons a bill jumps. The flapper warps or its seat pits, tank water slides into the bowl in a thin sheet, and the fill valve quietly tops the tank back up all day. Drop a dye tablet in the tank, wait fifteen quiet minutes without flushing, and check the bowl. Color in the bowl means the flapper is done.
How long does it take to find a hidden leak?
Usually a single visit, because each test shrinks the search area before the next one starts. The meter split takes minutes. Pressure isolation depends on how many working shutoff valves your house actually has. Acoustic and thermal confirmation depend on pipe material and access. What stretches a job out isn't the leak — it's seized valves and buried boxes, and we'll tell you if we hit either.
Is paying for leak detection worth it, or should I just open the wall?
Detection earns its keep the moment the leak isn't staring at you. Guess wrong with a drywall saw and you're paying to repair that wall while the leak keeps running — repeat until lucky. Evidence-first detection ends with one patch-sized cut at a confirmed failure point. One square of drywall mud versus re-hanging and repainting a hallway is not close math.
What happens if you can't find the leak?
We tell you exactly that — what we ruled out, what the remaining evidence says, and what the next test would be. Some leaks are genuinely intermittent: a drain that only fails with a full tub, an irrigation line that only pressurizes when a zone runs. What we won't do is cut on a hunch to make the visit feel productive. The gauge readings are yours either way, and you decide the next step.
Two months in or two days in, the tests work the same. Start with a text.
Call or text us at 405-519-1868. We serve Edmond and the OKC Metro, we're state licensed (#190465), and you'll see the evidence before anyone cuts anything. Got more than one thing acting up? Start at our general plumbing services page.