Laguna Beach Leak Detection

Leak detection in Laguna Beach often starts with an alert from the water district, a jump on the bill, or the sound of running water that won’t stop. We find where the water is escaping, whether that is under a slab, inside a wall, somewhere on a hillside lot or in pool and irrigation plumbing, so the repair can be small and in the right place.

Your smart meter may have noticed first

Laguna Beach County Water District, which supplies most of the city, fitted its meters with radios that report usage to the district several times a day. Its Smart Meter Dashboard, launched in 2018, shows your usage in near real time and offers two alerts worth turning on: a leak alert, sent after the meter records 24 hours of continuous flow, and a high-flow alert for an unusually large draw. If the house sits empty for part of the year, those alerts can catch a leak weeks before a bill would.

A test you can do yourself

The district’s own advice is to turn off every tap inside and out, write down the meter reading, and look again two to three hours later. If the number moved, you may have a leak. The meter is usually near the curb in a concrete box marked “water.” On the smart meter display, a plus sign appears while water is flowing through; if it stays with everything off, water is going somewhere. Some meters instead have a small red triangle that moves with even a slight flow. If you suspect a leak, the district’s customer service line can send a field representative out, which is worth doing when the leak might be at the meter itself.

What Laguna’s housing means for pipes

By Orange County standards this is an old town. SCAG’s housing profile shows more Laguna Beach homes built in 1939 or earlier, about 20 percent, than in any other period, and roughly 63 percent predate 1970. Water lines in houses that old may be galvanized steel, which corrodes from the inside and eventually pins through, or copper added during a remodel and joined to whatever original pipe was left. Mixed systems like that tend to leak at the transitions. Homes from the 1950s and 1960s are more likely to have copper throughout, sometimes running under a slab.

Hillside homes and pressure

Laguna climbs from the sand to 1,007 feet at Temple Hill in Top of the World, and on steep lots in the canyons and on the hills above town the meter can be a long way from the house. Two things follow. The service line may run through slopes, planters and retaining walls, where a leak can surface far from its source or not at all. And pressure changes with elevation, so many homes depend on a pressure regulator; when one fails, high pressure strains every valve and fitting in the house. We check the pressure as part of a leak call.

How we find the leak

• Isolate: close valves to separate the house from the yard, hot from cold, one branch from the next.
• Pressure test: hold a section under pressure and watch the gauge to confirm which line is losing water.
• Listen: acoustic equipment picks up the hiss of water escaping under concrete or soil.
• Look for heat: a thermal camera shows the warm path of a hot-water leak in a slab or wall.
• Mark and explain: you get the location and the repair choices, from a spot repair to a reroute, before anything is opened.

Pools, spas and irrigation

A pool that loses more than evaporation accounts for, or a sprinkler zone that leaves one spot soggy, can run up a bill as fast as a slab leak. The district’s water-use rules list leaving a pipe or fixture leak unrepaired among prohibited uses, so a known leak should be fixed promptly.

South Laguna

Part of South Laguna gets its water from South Coast Water District instead. SCWD has promoted an offer on Flume, a monitor that fastens to the water meter and sends leak alerts to your phone; ask the district whether it is still available.

For a leak that is actively damaging the house, use our emergency service. Otherwise, read more on our leak detection page, or phone (888) 300-9648 at any time of day or night. Other work we do in town is on our Laguna Beach page.