One Call for Any Leak
This page is the front door. Callers who already know they have a slab problem or a dead water heater go straight to those crews; callers with a mystery start here. The mystery version sounds like this. The bill jumped forty dollars, or the meter creeps with everything off, or there is a sound of water somewhere at night, or a smell without a stain. Whole-system leak detection exists for exactly these cases. It solves nearly all of them in one visit.
How a General Leak Call Gets Triaged
The sequence is the same every time because it works. Step one is the meter: with every fixture off, a moving register proves a pressurized leak and its flow rate. Step two divides the system, isolating the house from the yard line, then hot from cold, then branch from branch, until the losing section is cornered. Step three brings the instruments to that section: acoustic listening along the run, thermal imaging across the surfaces it hides behind, tracer gas when the leak is too quiet to hear. Step four is a mark, a photo, and a flat quote.
Drain-side and fixture leaks do not move the meter, so they get their own path: dye testing, camera work, and moisture mapping that separates a failed shower pan from a supply problem wearing its disguise. Either way, you learn what is actually wrong before anything is opened.
The Boulder Conditions Behind the Leak
Three local facts shape most of what we find. The housing spans 1859 to last year, so the same block downtown can hold original galvanized, sixty-year-old copper, and new PEX, each failing in its own signature way. The water is exceptionally soft alpine supply from Barker Reservoir, the Silver Lake watershed, and Boulder Reservoir, gentle on fixtures and unforgiving to elderly metal. And the seasons are genuinely hard: freeze splits in winter, meltwater in spring, irrigation season stressing the yard side all summer.
Season matters as much as address. A February call leans toward freeze damage on exterior walls and hose bib runs. An April call leans toward meltwater masquerading as plumbing. July and August tilt heavily toward the irrigation side of the meter, where a cracked zone line can outrun every fixture in the house combined.
Those patterns are why local diagnosis beats generic. A whistling pipe in a Pearl Street-adjacent Victorian and the same sound in a new build near the reservoir have different most-likely causes, and the search starts where the odds say.
What Repair Looks Like
The repair inherits the diagnosis. Failed sections are cut out and replaced in kind or better, fittings remade properly, worn valves swapped, and access openings sized to the work. Anything that points to a deeper problem, like a corroding pipe generation or high pressure, gets flagged with honest advice and a separate quote rather than an upsell. You get written notes on cause, spot, and fix for your records and any insurance talk.
Preventive Detection for Older Homes
Owners of pre-1970 houses increasingly book detection before anything is visibly wrong, and the logic is sound. A whole-system survey establishes a baseline: static pressure, meter behavior, the material and condition of every accessible run, moisture readings at the usual failure zones. For a landlord it becomes turnover documentation, and for a buyer it is negotiating information. For a longtime owner it is the difference between planning a repipe on your schedule and funding one on the pipe's schedule. The survey takes a couple of hours, produces a written report, and has more than once found a leak the owner did not know they were paying for.
From Downtown Boulder rentals to homes on the city's edge, mystery water has a short lifespan once instruments are on it. Call (303) 552-3896, day or night, and start with the meter reading if you have it.