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Plumbers of Boise
Plumbing · Idaho
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Slab Leak

Water escaping under a slab has nowhere to surface, so it saturates the fill and works sideways under the house until somebody finds and stops it.

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When this becomes an emergency

What a pro does

Confirmation comes before location. The plumber closes the house off at the main, watches the meter, and sees whether anything is still moving, which separates a genuine leak under the concrete from a running toilet upstairs. Only then does the search start. Locating uses acoustic listening gear and pressure isolation on one section of the system at a time, since cutting concrete on a hunch is expensive and rarely lands on the pipe. Slab construction is common through the subdivisions that filled in around Meridian, Kuna and Star from the 1990s onward, and those homes generally have soft copper looping through the slab. This valley's water carries a lot of mineral, and over years a scale layer combined with a spot of aggressive corrosion is enough to open a pinhole in a line that nobody ever touched. Newer builds using PEX from a central manifold behave differently and fail less often in the slab itself. The repair is either a small opening cut over the located spot or a reroute that abandons the buried run and brings a new line through the attic or a wall, which often makes more sense when the pipe's age suggests a second pinhole is coming.

Frequently asked questions

Many of the newer ones do. Older stock across the valley leans toward a vented crawlspace, but the subdivision growth through Meridian, Kuna and Star brought a lot of slab-on-grade construction, so the answer really depends on the decade the house was built.
Age plus chemistry plus contact. Soft copper buried in a slab sits against fill and concrete for decades, and a small aggressive spot on the outside or mineral action on the inside eventually thins the wall until it opens. Nothing has to hit the pipe for it to fail.
It's the usual reason, because a leaking hot line heats the slab above it in a way a cold line can't. Cold-side leaks under a slab are quieter and generally show up as a meter that keeps turning, or as damp along a wall, rather than as a warm patch.
Almost never. Detection narrows the location down to a small area first, and the opening is only as big as the work requires. Where the run is long or the pipe's condition suggests more failures ahead, rerouting the line overhead avoids repeating concrete work later.

Slab Leak?

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Plumbing in IdahoBurst PipeClogged DrainDrain CleaningEmergency PlumberNo Hot WaterOverflowing ToiletPlumber Near MeSewer Line RepairSump Pump RepairWater Heater RepairWater Leak Repair

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