Burst pipes and leaks
traced across Richmond

If you are on town water, turn it off at the meter, usually at the front boundary, clockwise until it stops. If you are on tank supply, switch the pressure pump off at its isolation switch and close the valve at the tank outlet, which does the same job. On a large block either of those can be a walk, so it is worth knowing where yours is before you need it. If water is anywhere near a light fitting, a power point or the switchboard, kill the power at the main switch first. Then open the lowest tap you have so the pressure drains out there rather than into a ceiling.

This is the genuine problem out here, because every piece of leak advice ever written starts with watching the water meter, and you do not have one. Use the pump instead. Turn every tap and appliance off, then listen. A pressure pump should sit silent. If it kicks in periodically with nothing running, water is escaping somewhere and the pump is repressurising the line to make up for it. That cycling is your meter. Time the gap between starts, because it tells us roughly how fast you are losing water before we even arrive.

Treat that as a leak until proven otherwise. On town water an escape shows up as a bill, which is unwelcome but at least arrives. On tank supply it shows up as running out of water, which is a considerably bigger problem and gives you no warning at all. A slow underground leak on a long rural service run can empty a tank steadily for weeks while everything above ground looks completely normal. If consumption has changed and the household has not, something is going somewhere.

On tank supply it is usually the pump rather than the water. Check whether the pump has power and whether its circuit has tripped, and check the tank level before assuming a fault, because a pump running dry is both the most common cause and the fastest way to destroy the pump itself. If the pump is running constantly and not building pressure, switch it off and ring us: at that point it is either drawing air or losing water, and leaving it running will cook it.

That is the point, and it matters more on acreage than anywhere. A service run from a tank or a meter to a house set well back from the road can be a long way, and trenching it speculatively is a lot of ground. We use acoustic listening along the line and thermal imaging where hot water is involved, then mark the position on the surface so any opening is one small hole in a known place.

Worth investigating rather than accepting, and worth being a little sceptical of the obvious explanation. On low-lying Hawkesbury ground people reasonably attribute persistent damp to the water table or to drainage, and often that is exactly right. But a pressurised line losing water underground produces an identical symptom and does it continuously, including through dry spells when everything around it has dried out. That last detail is the tell.

Usually the damage is and the pipe itself usually is not. Most policies cover water damage to the building and contents from a sudden burst, exclude the cost of repairing the failed pipe, and exclude damage from a leak that has been seeping gradually rather than bursting. On tank supply there is a further wrinkle worth knowing: the water you lost has no meter reading behind it and no utility allowance to claim against, so documenting the repair properly matters more, not less. Keep everything we give you.