Hey guys, Roger Wakefield, LEED AP, "the Expert Plumber" coming to you live this
morning. This is a little bit different venue, as you see I got my back up
against some curtains. I'm in a hotel room in Kansas City, Missouri. Here today
to speak to plumbers, electricians, roofers and HVAC techs on how to grow
their business. But what I'm here for for you is to teach you how do plumbers find
leaks? How do plumbers find leaks is a very important question because we all
do it different. The problem is I don't think all plumbers do it right. When we
go in to do a leak test on a residential house, a sewer and water test, the problem
that we run into is first of all we've got to have clean outs. And we need clean
outs there because what we need to do is we need to isolate the sewer line before
it gets out to the city tap. And normally there's a two way clean-out right
outside of a house. We can go in there, we can stick a test ball in with a long
hose, bring the hose up we fill up the test ball. So literally we're stopping up
the sewer right past the two-way clean-out as it goes towards the city
drain. And then what we're doing there is we clog that up and then we
fill it up with water, either to the top of a clean-out or we can actually rise
that up or extend that up a little bit and get that up to the foundation level.
Or we can go into the house and pull a toilet. We can actually put the test ball
in, bring it up higher and then go in and pull a toilet and fill it up to that
level ,which actually brings us up to the floor level. So what we're trying to do
and I hate that TREC put it in their form where they call it a
"hydrostatic test", other real estate companies call it a "hydrostatic test", and
it's just it's really not what that is. A hydrostatic test involves a hydrostatic
pump. You pump up the system, that's mainly done on a water line. If you have
a plumber that comes in and says he wants to do a hydrostatic pump, he wants
to pump up your system, he wants to build up the pressure, guys that's not a good
way to do things. So what we call it is a "leak test". We did
a leak test on the sewer, we do a leak test on the water, we also do a leak test
on the gas. So whenever we put that test ball in, we
fill it, up then we wait, we watch the water level. It may bounce around for a
little bit trying to determine its own level, because you've got different vents
and different areas. But once it settles down, once that water level stops and
stays consistent what we do then is we go in set a timer and watch it to see if
it drops any. Normally within 5 or 10 minutes we're gonna know if it's a good
sized leak. If it's a smaller leak it can take a little bit longer. But what we do
is we set that for about, we set a timer for about 30 minutes and watch and see
how far it drops. Now that is just to test for the leak. So how we find it on a
sewer line is a little bit different. If we know that there's a leak in there
what we'll do is we'll take cameras, we'll take test balls with long hoses,
we'll push it up through your system to different areas. Once we get to those
different areas we can isolate those and then do this test again.
Once we get the test to hold with different areas isolated, then we can
know what system or what section is actually leaking. Once we know that, then
we can go into that area and pull test balls every foot or two to try to
determine where that leak is. Guys, the problem is on a sewer line the leak
location it takes quite a while to do it and it normally takes a couple of guys.
You need to be able to pull the cam - pull the test balls, you need to be able to
push with cameras, you need to be able to get above with a locator and locate
where that camera is, so you know right where your leak is or right where you're
trying to isolate. Got a thing that we do called flipping test balls. We can take
the test ball and put it in an area and blow it up take another test ball in and
get it to roll up and go up a side branch to isolate different lines. It's
not very easy to do and it takes a lot of training and a lot of experience, but
to do it right to locate leaks for people to where you
can tell them: look, this is your leak. It's right here. You've got to be able to
go through the entire process and do it right and that takes quite a bit of time.
I don't like it that a lot of plumbers just walk in and say look you have a
leak, we need to replace everything. Guys, that's normally not the case. Even if you
have old cast iron lines it does not mean that everything under there is bad.
We've actually tunneled up under houses here in Dallas that are 60 and 80 years
old and believe it or not, that the cast iron actually looks good. It's in good
shape it, has a good thickness to it, the bottom of it is not rotted out, so it's
not like people poured acidic drain cleaners down in it and rotted out the
bottom. That channel rots horrible. You can take a good piece of cast iron
pipe, poor acidic drain cleaners down it and eat out the bottom of it. So that's
how we look at it on a sewer line. Water lines a little bit different. First of
all we're gonna go in, we're gonna put a gauge on at the house, we're gonna shut
off the meter and we're gonna see if the house loses pressure. The next thing
we need to do is start isolating, kind of like we did on the sewer test isolation.
Here its a little bit different. First thing that we want to do is we want to
find the valve box in the front yard. If we can shut that valve box off then we
know if the leak is in the yard or if the leak is in the house, because we're
going to test it again. If we tested it before and it leaked down and then we
shut off the valve going into the house and we pressurized it again when we shut
it down now, we shut that valve and that pressure, if the gauge is inside the
house, that pressure test now holds, now we know that the leak is out in the yard
service. Guys, some people don't have valve boxes, some people have old gate
valves. They need to be replaced. We recommend replacing those with a ball
valve, that way we can get a true isolation from the house to the yard
service. You don't want us looking under your house all day long if your leaks
out in your yard so isolation is huge. Then if we determine the leak is in the
house our next thing is go to the water heater, isolate the hot in the cold side.
Because if we can shut off the hot, do the test on the system and determine
whether it's hot or cold, now we're only looking through half the lines,
we only have to locate half the lines, and we're only listening to those. Again
guys, isolation is huge, because what isolation
does is it allows us... It's kind of like looking for a needle in a haystack if
you can cut that haystack into quarters or more, now you're looking in just one a
little section. And guys when you're paying a plumber to come out and look
for leaks you want to make sure he's got the right equipment. We've got cameras,
we've got, I've got tests ball hoses, hoses anywhere from 3 feet to 70 feet I
think, maybe 75. But different houses you need different lengths to go in and
isolate different areas on the water leak. It's a little bit different, we have
some of the best high end electronic equipment that there is for locating, for
listening. We actually buy our product from Leaktronics out in California, and
they've got a great high end product that you literally can go around and
listen for a water leak under the floor. Now the things that may affect this, that
we may have to look at, is we may have to pull back your carpet. If your leaks
under a hardwood floor, you've got the hardwood floor but then
you have a base under it. Guys it's hard, it's almost impossible to listen through
all that. At that point if you don't want to go through the hardwood floor we try
to get real close, we listen to both ends so we can isolate the line, we know what
line it is, and then we can give you a price to tunnel and based on what we hear
and where we hear, that may be the best thing, because then we're not damaging
your floor inside your house, and believe it or not a lot of insurance companies
like that. We work with them, we communicate with them, we want to make
sure that we're doing the best job for you, but we also want to make sure that
their interests are covered too. So we like to communicate with them and, you
know, make sure everybody's on the same page and make sure that we're doing
things right. So the leak test for sewer and water, guys, they're very easy.
They're very easy to explain really, not necessarily easy to do. But with the
right equipment and the right training and getting the right people out there,
guys, this is a job that you don't want just anyone to do. I've seen
plumbing companies before come in and just because waters
coming up at a certain spot in the floor, they're like that's the leak. Guys, we've
actually gone in and located the leak 25 - 30 feet away from there and what you
don't want to do is end up just making holes everywhere that you think a leak
is. Get a company, a reputable company, in to do your leak detection and make sure
that you're at least a johnny-on-the-spot. Now, is it always 100%
accurate? No it's - we're trying to look under the ground, under your house
and find a leak. Water lines are sleeved, so that water, that noise, the air
bubbles, any noise it makes may be moving through a beam, it may be
moving through that plastic to another area where there's a hole and it's
coming out. So, guys there's no 100% rocket science guarantee on it because
all we can do is listen to the noises that we hear and base our decision on
all the years of experience that we have doing this and all the training that we
have. Now for a gas leak. Gas leaks are a little bit different. Gas leaks, gas
leaks for a lot of fun. What you do is you pressurize the system and you crawl
around, you smell, you take a spray bottle with soapy water and you start spraying
down all the joints. You are literally looking all over the place to try and
find sometimes just the smallest leak. Guys, it's not easy, sometimes you have to
take systems apart, isolate different areas. It's kind of crazy. First of
all we do the visual. We go through it and we soap down every joint that we can
see. If it's a CSST system and they've got a manifold, we can isolate different
areas. But what we're trying to do is isolate the area that's leaking, then
we're spraying down all the joints, we can go in with a sniffer. Sniffers are
great, but if there's ever been a leak there before or any residue, something like that a
sniffer sometimes to pick that up. So what we like to do is we like to get a
spray bottle in there, spray everything down make sure that we're
getting the right spot. That way when we fix it we can pump it back up, test it
and let you know that you're safe. So guys I'm Roger Wakefield with Texas
Green Plumbing. I hope that you're liking these
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information that you need. My name is Roger Wakefield with Texas
Green Plumbing, saving you money one drop at a time. Have a great day, y'all.