You can do the first test yourself, tonight, for free, and it is the same test we would start with.
Turn off every tap in the house. No dishwasher, no washing machine, no ice maker, no irrigation, nobody flushing. Go out to the water meter, usually in a box in the parkway strip near the sidewalk, and lift the lid. Most meters have a small triangular or star-shaped dial that spins whenever water is moving. Watch it for two full minutes. If it turns at all, water is going somewhere in your system and it is not going into a faucet.
That is a leak. If the dial is dead still, whatever is bothering you is probably not a pressurized leak, and half the reason people call us is settled before anyone drives over.
The Long Beach problem is the slab
Two kinds of housing stock, two entirely different leaks.
The postwar tracts, Los Altos, El Dorado Park, Bixby Highlands, were built on concrete slabs with the copper supply lines buried underneath, cast right into the ground. When one of those lines fails, and after sixty or seventy years in soil they do, the water has nowhere to go but under your floor. Nothing shows on a wall. Nothing drips from a ceiling. You just get a water bill that has quietly doubled, or a patch of floor that is warm underfoot, which means it is the hot line and not the cold. Some people hear it: a faint hiss in a quiet house at two in the morning.
The pre-1940 raised-foundation bungalows in Rose Park, California Heights, and Bluff Heights have the opposite arrangement. The pipes are in a crawlspace under the floor, which means the leak is visible if somebody is willing to get down there with a flashlight. What those houses have instead is galvanized steel supply, which corrodes from the inside and eventually weeps at the threads, and a lot of cast-iron drain still in service.
Under both of them, the ground has been moving. A century of subsidence over the Wilmington oil field plus the Newport-Inglewood fault has put stress on buried pipe that no plumber ever designed for.
How the leak actually gets found
The point of a leak detection call is to find the leak without destroying your house, and the honest description of the tools is less dramatic than the marketing.
Acoustic listening is the workhorse. Pressurized water escaping a pipe makes a specific noise, and a ground microphone on a quiet slab will localize it surprisingly well in the hands of somebody who has done it a thousand times. Thermal imaging finds hot-water slab leaks fast, because a hot line running under concrete leaves a signature you can see. Tracer gas, usually a hydrogen and nitrogen mix, gets used when the first two are ambiguous: the system is drained, the gas is introduced, and it migrates up through the slab where it can be sniffed out.
None of it is magic. The skill is in the person, not the equipment, and an inexpensive detection that misses by four feet costs you a jackhammered hole in the wrong part of your living room.
The bill is your smoke alarm
A slab leak of any size will show up on your Long Beach Water Department bill before it shows up on your floor. If your usage jumps and your habits did not, believe the meter and not your eyes.
One thing worth doing that nobody thinks of: ask the water department whether they offer any adjustment or credit for a documented leak that has been repaired. Some agencies do. It costs you a phone call to find out, and the answer may be worth several hundred dollars.
The advice that costs us money
If this is your first slab leak, repair it. Spot repairs are the right call the first time: open the slab, cut out the bad section, done.
If it is your second, stop. A second failure in the same slab is not bad luck. It is the pipe telling you it has reached the end of its service life, and the third and fourth leaks are already forming somewhere you cannot see yet. At that point you reroute the supply lines overhead through the attic and walls and abandon what is under the concrete. It is a bigger and more expensive job than the spot repair we could sell you instead, and it is the one that ends the problem. We would rather say that now than take three separate calls from you over four years.
Questions
What does leak detection cost in Long Beach?
Detection on its own generally runs $250 to $500, depending on how much of the house has to be ruled out. The repair is separate, and it varies enormously: a slab leak spot repair is commonly $2,000 to $4,000 once you count the concrete work and the flooring. Beware the very cheap detection quote. It is frequently a loss leader attached to a repair you have not agreed to yet.
Does homeowners insurance cover it?
Read your policy, and read the difference between sudden damage and gradual damage, because that distinction is where the money is. Many policies pay for the water damage a leak caused and for the cost of accessing the pipe, while excluding the pipe repair itself. We are a referral service and not your insurer, so take that as a prompt to call your carrier rather than as an answer.
My meter is spinning but I see nothing inside.
Before you assume a slab leak, shut the valve at the house and watch the meter again. If it stops, the leak is inside. If it keeps going with the house isolated, the leak is in the service line between the meter and the building, which in a Naples or Alamitos Beach yard with a high water table can run for months without ever surfacing. Then check the irrigation, which is the single most commonly missed culprit. And check the toilets: a flapper that leaks by is silent, invisible, and can waste more water in a month than most people would guess.
Should I just wait and see?
No. Water under a slab washes out the soil that supports it.
Find the leak
Tell us what the meter dial did, what your last two bills looked like, and whether any part of the floor is warm. Those three things get a good plumber most of the way there before they arrive. If your answer is that the dial did not move, we will tell you to keep your money and go look at your irrigation timer.
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