Things to Consider When Building Your Home to Prevent Future Slab Leaks

It can really troublesome to have slab leak in your home as they can be very costly to deal with, especially if left undetected for a long period of time. This problem can happen to everyone and despite your best efforts to prevent them, it may happen eventually. Of course preventing is a much better method than repairing. But pipes can leak even it is already made from the best material.
On of the most dangerous location of leak is on the foundation, as it can endanger the integrity of the building. A building with weak foundation can be threatened by sudden collapse. Especially if we consider the fact that slab leak can happen without knowledge due to the lack of signs and if there are signs, they can be quite subtle which make them left unnoticed.
Obviously, the best way to do is to ask your contractor to check your piping, especially on spring, as pipes integrity can be stressed during a cold winter. You should know the normal water volume of your pipes, when there is a sudden drop in water output, you may have a leak somewhere.
If your pipes are leaking, your only solution is to have them fixed, the best thing to do is to get an expert that have a good experience in repairing the leak without destroying too many slabs. During house construction, make sure that all pipes are assembled correctly and tightly. The cuts should be straight and clean to prevent unnecessary leaks. If you are living in an area with many earthquakes, then you may need an extra strong piping network to withstand sudden vibrations. If the soil in your location is unstable, even there is no earthquake, the foundation may shift and move which put some pressure on the pipes. So it may be necessary to fully strengthen the foundation to compensate for the unstable soil condition. These are things to consider when building your home, to prevent future slab leak problems.

The Importance of Accurate Slab Leak Detection

Slab leaks usually occur when there is a problem with plumbing pipes beneath your concrete slabs. It is considered as a serious problem because concrete, unlike normal ground can be difficult and expensive to deal with. If left untreated, water accumulation under concrete foundation can weaken the structure and degrades building quality, which in turn may endanger you and your family members. Worse, due to its location, leak under concrete slab can be hard to detect, as you won’t see any visible water accumulation. As the result, you may need to ask for experts help to do regular check on the situation of your foundation, before disaster strikes.
Luckily, we do have some ways to know whether leak may happen under the concrete slab. If you hear some water noises under the concrete slab, have higher-than-usual water bills, increasing humidity under your carpeting and warm spots, you may have leakage under the concrete slabs. If more than one symptom appears, immediately contact an expert. Slab leak usually happen when you have bad pipes, badly assembled fittings and pipes, unexpected electrolysis, rusts or small earthquakes.
Directly taking your concrete slabs apart to check the leak can be wasteful and costly. Make sure your contractors have tools designed to detect leakage under concrete without excavating the entire foundation. It would better if your contractor can guarantee that once the slab is excavated, they’ll find the leak. That way you can be protected financially, from incompetent contractors. If you are in the process of building your home, before assembling pipes under the slabs, make sure you understand the effect of electrolysis, Make sure your metal pipes won’t create electrical charges which make tiny holes. There are few methods to prevent it, ask your contractor for the best method for you.

How to Detect Slab Leak Easily

Among the riskiest things that might take place to any homeowners is slab leak escalation. Even worse than that, when the escalating slab leak has a crimp within the water line it can make things worsen. If a piping falls apart eventually, because the water pipings are ancient, then you need to prepare a good deal of money for replacing the pipes.
If you believe that there is a water leak below the concrete building foundation or slab, you should do an easy water measurement. The essential thing that you should do is find the meter and then be sure that the water is switched off for the entire building.
Put differently, be sure that you have no faucets dripping, toilets running, sprinklers watering the yards, wash machines working, and nobody is taking a bath or shower. If there is no leakage on your building, the water meter should not move in the least.
You should take a snapshot of your water meter with your digital camera for a proof or you should take note on the meter reading and write down the numbers, and also its exact time. Return and read the number again in half-hour. If the water meter reading hasn't moved, then do it again in two hours if the number hardly even move then that’s great. It means that there is no water leak.
If the numbers change then you could have a leak or two somewhere in the building. If the numbers move only slightly, you could call the water leak detection service, to have a better second opinion. All water leaks must be serviced immediately, because they may cause damages on structural foundation, wooden foundations and may even bring in mildew and mold.

Causes of Slab Leak

There are four commonly found causes of slab leaks in a residential area, such as inadequate piping and fitting workmanship, chemistry of water and piping materials, unstable substructure, and large water pressure.
Inadequate Craftsmanship: novice pipe fitters, inadequate craftsmanship, bad plumbing materials, broken piping setup - are all parametric quantities that work to heighten possibilities that your water supply system is very ineffective and buckle under very easily to wear and tear, water flow, water chemistry and water pressure.
Chemistry: Copper pipings can react with the water chemical characteristics which will cause pinhole leaks.
Unstable Foundation: an unsatisfactory plumbing system can shift over time and break pipes.
Large Water Pressure: Copper pipings with smaller diameters can raise the water pressure and corrode the pipings until they entirely burst open.
Bad workmanship can also cause slab leaks at the outgoing DWV pipeline, however the other three causes are prevailing in the sanitary sewage system including rusty and burst pipes and also when using commercial drain cleaners.
Aged Pipes: sand, soil or gravel are permeable to water and can rust cast iron or galvanized pipings nearby. Rusty pipings are more vulnerable to damage and bursts.
Ruptured pipeworks: unstable foundation may take apart galvanized, cast iron or polyvinyl chloride (PVC) pipings, particularly where they change or turn directions.
Commercial Waste Pipe Cleaners: They may eat on metal pipelines

How to Detect Slab Leak?

A slab leak happens if the water pipe (an outgoing sanitary one or incoming one) is leaking out under or within the concrete substructure. Since a damaged water pipe is bonded inside the groundwork or directly under it, it is a lot more difficult to fix than a leaking out pipework that's obvious to your naked eye. As the foundation is actually a “slab”, it's known as the “slab” leak. The water system you utilize in home derives from your town and broadens all over the home. You also get water supply getting out of the home from the bathroom and the kitchen. As the water supply getting into the home is pressurised, the slab leak in one of those water pipeworks may cause a few dangerous flooding in the home as the water supply is pressurized and will not switched off. The slab leak from among an outgoing pipeworks (from the kitchen or bathroom), eventhough it won't create as much leak, still holds the possibility to create a certain impairment to the groundwork. Even though flooding can take place because of the slab leak, it's a lot more possible that a slab leak will stay unobserved , except if the breakage took place near the slab. At this moment know, you can have severe slab leak below house. However as there's no chance of determining it, it's occasionally difficult to find.
Typical factors of slab leaks for example the shifting of the groundwork (because of bad design or ground situations), inferior water supply lines, water supply pressure that's excessively high, and the water chemistry(when the pH scale of the water supply is excessively high, then the incoming copper pipeworks may begin to rust and you'll have pinhole leakages). You may also figure out if you get a slab leak by examining the water supply meter in the home. If the small arrow moves within a few minutes, that implies that there is a slab leak.

The shocking cost of slab leak and the need for homeowner's insurance

What a fun moment this has been.

That morning I switched on the warm water and rushed upstair to have a shower bath. There was no water pressure level in the bathroom shower head, then I tested the guest bathroom. It was good than nothing, so I took a bath. But the water supply went from tepid to frigid in approximately three seconds.

Then I contacted FAHBP to explicate the trouble and get assistance. I talked with Maddie. She contacted me back and stated a person might have checked a couple of days. I tell her my emergency in a lot more detail and she stated, "oh, so it is an urgent condition!" and came up with someone more rapidly.

Shortly, Henry from Actinium Plumbing contacted. I delineated the trouble signs and he told "you have got a slab leak." That entails the there is a failure in the pipeworks that run from the concrete slab upon which the home sits. I inquired him what is needed in amending such a serious problem and he started out to utter of pneumatic hammers! And it may cost me up to $3000

In the meantime, I chose to call up FAHBP and inquire how much they will cover. The answer: $2000. Great to know.

Actualizing that, I contacted the insurance broker to ascertain what my householder's policy covers. If that was a abrupt unplanned trouble, as opposed to a long-standing slab leak, I am covered. That is great... I hope.

They hinted that I reaffirm with the Home Owner's Association that they are not responsible for any of that. I was quite certain that would be the subject, but I contacted anyhow. And I was correct.

It's great to have a good houseowner insurance

An ordinary experience on dealing with slab leak

A couple of words that need to occupy you with little terror, except if you are a plumber.

The term slab leak is employed to identify what occurs when belowground water pipeworks snap within a fixed construction. You could be at first went to believe that such an event could be induced by frozen ground in wintertime, but due to the insulating attributes of ground and the held heat energy beaming from the construction only a foot higher up, this is seldom the case.

Slab leaks are most frequently the outcome of three combined components:

* non-insulated, galvanised steel pipework
* acidic ground preconditions indigenous to the location
* Time period (thirty years are the average)

Never has been in my whole life heard those a couple of words uttered conjointly, until the disastrous moment in January when they broke through of the plumber's talk when we talked in the porch of my row house - which was swallowed up under one inch of quickly streaming water.

I had halted by my home not a couple of hours before that good afternoon, just to doze off and collect something else, and I recall when I locked up and shut the kitchen doorway on my exit that all things in my home was absolutely OK. When I came back at approximately five right after work, I pulled in into the driveway to see the panorama of a fleetly running current of water moving out of the home from below the kitchen doorway. A modest sense of worry affected me, and I recall getting out the truck door as I raced to my home, blundering with the doors, to have the kitchen doorway open. Certainly, my kitchen was awash as was the TV room outside, and to my hopeless repulsion, I found out my business office adjacent to the kitchen (which incorporated a treasure trove of invaluable valuables, including tthe computers) was currently a boggy shining pond.

To make a lengthy chronicle short, the body of water was break off at a meter close to the road. I had to visit a buddy's home the following daybreak to shower bath for work. Plumbers with pneumatic hammer* came in, and demolished the kitchen floor. They repaired the pipework, yet it was Friday, and do you've any thought what plumbers charge up to do a work on the weekend? It fills neurosurgeons jealousy. Carpet folks attached to their truck-mounted vacuum cleaner and shredded the rugs, bringing down clamorous fans to dry the sop the behemoth suckers could not absorb. For a couple of days my home was just like a Louisiana bayou fair, with expansive plaza and methane gas aromas.

Then come Monday, two pouches of Quik-Crete cleared the open opening fade away, and a couple of days after that the flooring folks made the miserable tragedy into a aesthetical brand-new shiny vinyl floor. Since the slab leak broke through below the counter, I needed to delay another day for the handymen to arrive and repair the countertop, and so the plumbers had to return and restore the impairment to the sinkhole and water line that the handymen had made. Ultimately, I was without my dearest kitchen for the whole week.

Slab leak. My blood line runs frigid at those words. I am fortunate to have just been a renter; I feel for the proprietor and the ordeal she need to have to hold up with her insurance mailman. Nowadays I need to call out on plumbers once again, as I've been catiously observing the stifled noise of flowing water in the bathroom for a month now. I dreaded the toughest, since I was narrated after the January tragedy that this kind of matter could occur once more without any sign, right now that it was observable that the pipeworks below the concrete slab were rusting. I hit the jackpot this moment, however: there was indeed a fresh outflow, but the plumbers find it - outdoors. The next day they'll be come back with town workers to begin the find proceeding, and then the water line from the road to my row house is going to be ripped up and put back. Oh what a delight!

I need to note that in conditions where slab leak gets a haunting serious problem in a building, the most cost-efficient method is to go around the belowground pipeworks by setting up brand-new piping system in the walls and attic.

I think I have to move.