Traced with equipment where they are hidden, and dealt with where they are in plain sight and have been for years. Which is usually the tap on the outside wall.
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Ask most people to name the plumbing on their property and they will describe the bathroom, the kitchen and the hot water system. Almost nobody mentions the taps on the outside walls, which is odd, because those are the fittings doing the hardest work.
A garden tap lives outdoors in the weather. It gets turned by whoever happens to be using it, usually harder than it needs, and it is the first fitting on most houses to start weeping. And nobody rings about it, because it is outside and it is only dripping, so it drips for a decade.
There are two reasons to deal with it. The first is that a weeping tap wastes water continuously, and outdoors nobody notices it accumulating. It arrives as a bill rather than as a puddle.
The second is the one that matters more on this side of the suburb. A tap whose washer and seat have gone is a tap you cannot rely on, and it can seize or fail outright at exactly the moment you would want it working. That is a poor thing to discover then rather than on a quiet afternoon.
Every tap, and whether a hose from each one reaches where you would want it. Ten minutes, and most people are surprised.
The expensive part of a burst is the minutes between the failure and somebody closing the water. Everything after that is a repair. Everything during it is carpet, cabinetry and plaster.
So find your meter and its tap now, on a dry afternoon, and make sure it actually turns. On older properties here they seize, and discovering that at eleven at night is the worst possible time to discover it.
It is also worth knowing where the isolating valves are inside: under the sink, behind the toilet, at the hot water unit. Closing one of those stops a specific problem without taking water off the whole house, which matters at two in the morning.
Outdoors, cranked hard, used with a hose pulling sideways on them, and almost never maintained. They are usually the first fitting on a house to start weeping, and on a block with a garden this size they get used far more than the ones inside.
Nothing about that is unusual and nothing about it is your fault. It is just the fitting with the hardest life.
The fitting behind the tap takes the same punishment. Where a tap has been wrenched on and off for twenty years, the connection into the wall or the riser has been worked just as hard, and that is the failure that actually floods something.
A tap weeping onto soil accumulates nothing visible. No stain, no puddle, nothing to walk past and notice, which is exactly why it runs for a quarter.
It arrives as a water bill that is higher than it should be with nothing wet to explain it. A slow outdoor leak is one of the two or three most common reasons for that.
The number is less trivial than it sounds. A steady drip is tens of litres a day and a genuine trickle is hundreds, and on a quarterly bill that is the difference between annoying and worth a phone call.
Washer and seat gone means the fitting is worn, and a worn tap can seize or let go properly the next time somebody leans on it. That is a different sort of afternoon.
Better found on a Tuesday with a plumber standing there than at the moment you actually need to shut water off.
If you have a garden that depends on a particular tap through summer, that is the one to have looked at in spring rather than in January.
Close every tap in the house, do not run the machine or the dishwasher, and watch the smallest dial on the meter for a couple of minutes. If it creeps, water is genuinely leaving the property somewhere.
If it sits perfectly still, your bill is telling you about usage rather than a leak, and that is worth knowing before anybody starts opening things up.
Do it twice if the result surprises you, and leave a couple of hours between. A cistern refilling or an ice maker cycling will move the dial and neither is a leak.
If the dial is moving, shut the valve on the inlet to the hot water unit and watch again. Still moving means the leak is on the cold side. Stopped means it is the unit or the hot line beyond it.
Two minutes of that halves the search area before anybody arrives, and it is the single most useful thing a householder can do for us.
The braided hoses under sinks and behind cisterns have a service life of around five years and they do not fail gently. They let go all at once, at mains pressure, frequently while the house is empty.
They are cheap and quick to replace and they are the most common single cause of a genuinely destructive indoor flood. If yours are older than you can remember, that is the answer.
They are also the one thing on this page worth doing before anything is wrong. Replacing the lot on an average house is a short visit, and it removes the single most likely cause of a claim on your insurance.
Pressure at an ordinary outside tap comes from the network rather than from anything on the property, so it keeps working through an outage. Useful to know on a street that loses power in storms.
A tank fed by an electric pump is a different proposition entirely, and if that is what supplies your garden then an outage takes it with it.
Which makes an outside tap genuinely useful in an outage, and worth checking works before you need it for something more important than the garden.
This is the most common way a leak announces itself here, because a property with a garden and a slope can absorb a surprising amount of water without ever showing a puddle. The bill is the symptom and the ground has taken the evidence.
Start with the meter test above, because it costs nothing and it splits the problem in two. Water genuinely leaving the property is a leak to find. A still dial with a high bill is usually irrigation, a filling pool, or a cistern that has been running quietly for a month.
If it is a leak, the order we work in is meter, then hot water isolation, then the service line from the meter to the house. That last one is the expensive possibility and the one worth ruling in or out early, because on a long driveway it is a long pipe.
Acoustic listening picks up the sound a pressurised leak makes through pipe, soil and slab. Thermal imaging finds the temperature difference a hot water leak leaves behind a wall. Pressure testing isolates sections until the one losing water identifies itself.
Between the three of them, most leaks get located to within a small area before anything is cut, which is the entire point. The cost of finding it properly is almost always less than the cost of guessing wrong once.
Fixed price agreed before anything starts. These are indicative 2026 ranges.
Water stopped and the situation stabilised, at any hour.
Washer, seat and spindle, so it stops weeping and starts turning properly.
Depending on the run to it. Worth doing where a hose will not currently reach.
Acoustic, pressure and thermal, with nothing opened to find it.
Depending on the pipe, the material and how it has to be reached.
Because the call is usually about something indoors and the answer outside is usually yes.
Where it is concealed: acoustic listening, pressure testing and thermal imaging until it is a point rather than an area.
Including the outside taps if you have asked, which takes minutes while somebody is already on site.
What failed, where, and what it took, at the figure agreed before we started.
Shut it off at the meter and ring. A licensed plumber can be heading toward you while you are still on the call.
Call 1300 381 569What Pennant Hills locals ask us before booking a plumber.
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More often than people think, and not for the drip. A garden tap is the hardest working fitting on a property: it lives outdoors, it gets cranked hard by whoever is using it, and it is nearly always the first thing on a house to start weeping. A tap that is weeping is a tap whose washer and seat have gone, and that is a fitting you cannot rely on.
Two things. It wastes water continuously, which shows on a bill rather than on the ground. And a tap in that condition can seize or fail properly at the point you actually need it, which is a considerably worse moment than a Tuesday afternoon.
Yes, and it is ordinary work. Whether a hose from each existing tap reaches every side of the house is worth ten minutes of walking around to check, and where it does not, adding an outlet is neither complicated nor expensive.
A tap on the mains does, because the pressure comes from the network rather than from your property. A supply drawn from a tank by an electric pump does not, because the pump needs electricity. That distinction is worth knowing rather than assuming.
Turn the water off at the meter before anything else, then ring. How much a burst costs is almost entirely decided by how long the supply stayed on.
Acoustic listening, pressure testing and thermal imaging, chosen to suit what is leaking and where it runs. None of them require opening a wall to have a look.
A garden tap repaired is $150 to $300. A new outside tap installed is $250 to $550 depending on the run. Locating a concealed leak is $250 to $600. A burst repair is $300 to $900.
Tell us about the one you rang about, and mention the outside taps while you are at it. They are ten minutes each and they are the fittings nobody has looked at.
Located, repaired, and the ones in plain sight dealt with at the same time.
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