Plumbing Inspections and Troubleshooting

Low pressure gets blamed on the city far more often than the city deserves. There are three places the problem can live, and testing in order tells them apart: the supply coming into the building, the distribution piping inside it, or the fixture itself.

We take a gauge reading at an outside hose bib or the laundry tub to see what the service delivers, static and under flow. A healthy static reading with a big drop the moment water moves points at a restriction rather than a pressure problem. That is the signature of galvanized supply narrowed from the inside over fifty years. Any pressure reducing valve gets checked, because PRVs drift and fail in both directions. Too much pressure is its own problem: it shortens fixture life and often shows up as a water heater relief valve that keeps weeping.

If the whole building is fine and a single fixture is not, then it is the fixture. An aerator packed with debris, a partly closed angle stop, a screen blocked with rust after a shut-off, or a shower valve with a seized pressure-balancing spool. Short to find, and worth ruling out before anyone talks about repiping the house.

The simplest test for a hidden leak is the meter, and you can run it yourself before calling anyone. Shut every fixture off, note the reading or watch the low-flow indicator, and leave it two hours with nobody using water. If it moved, water is going somewhere. That one check separates a house with a leak from a billing error.

From there it is a process of narrowing. We isolate sections and pressure test them, take moisture readings on finished surfaces, listen on the line, and rule out the quiet consumers first. A toilet flapper passing into the bowl is the most common hidden leak in any house, it makes almost no sound, and it wastes more water in a month than a visible drip does in a year.

Some leaks come down to opening something up. When it gets to that, we keep the opening as small as the job allows and show you where it goes before anything is cut. No method finds every leak without ever making a hole.

For backups that keep returning, a camera is the difference between a guess and a diagnosis. We see what the drain actually is, whether clay tile, cast iron or ABS, and what is wrong with it: root intrusion at a joint, a belly holding standing water, a collapsed or offset section, or simply a blockage that will clear and stay cleared. Where a repair is on the table, we locate the defect to a point on the ground so the digging is not exploratory.

Findings come back in writing: what we inspected, what we found, what we could not access and why, and what we would do about each item, sorted into what needs attention now, what to budget for, and what to leave alone. That last group matters as much as the first. A report listing twenty urgent items is a sales document, not an assessment.

For a pre-purchase inspection the report goes to your agent or lawyer. For a renovation, your contractor prices against it before the wall opens and the schedule moves.