Pick one and we will keep it short. Three taps and you are done.
We run calls seven days a week, and we answer the phone around the clock.
Last step. We will call you back to confirm the window.
An emergency deserves a person, not a web form sitting in an inbox. Call the shop and we pick up.
No heat, no water, an active leak, or a backed up main. These move to the front of the line, day or night, weekend or holiday.
Your request is in and somebody will call you back to confirm a window. Here is what we have:
Two things have to be settled before anybody cuts into a wall or a slab: whether water is genuinely leaving your pipes, and where it is going. You can answer the first yourself in an hour at the meter, for nothing.
A hidden leak bills you twice. The water turns up on the next statement from Prince William Water. The damage turns up months later in the subfloor and the framing, long after the cause is buried. The Insurance Information Institute puts water damage and freezing claims at an average of $15,400 across 2019 to 2023.
You do not need us for the first step and should not pay anyone for it. The meter settles whether water is leaving your pipes at all, which is a different question from where.
Those four readings are worth more to us than anything you can describe on the phone. EPA's WaterSense program puts the average household's leaks at more than 9,300 gallons wasted a year, says nine percent of homes waste 50 gallons or more per day, and estimates that fixing the straightforward ones saves about 10 percent on a water bill. EPA's household leak page has the rest.
A list of equipment is not a diagnosis. Each method answers one narrow question, and knowing which question is the difference between a small access cut in the right place and a floor opened twice.
| Method | What it can establish | Where it stops |
|---|---|---|
| Meter and valve isolation | That water is leaving the system, and whether the loss is on the utility side of the meter or on yours | Proves a leak exists. Says nothing about where in the house it is |
| Sectional pressure testing | Which branch of the supply piping will not hold pressure | Narrows it to a branch, not to a foot of pipe. Nothing to measure on a drain or waste line, which carries no pressure to lose |
| Acoustic listening, ground microphone | Position of a pressurized leak under a slab or under soil, usually within a small area | Needs the line pressurized and the house quiet. Carpet, deep fill over the pipe and road noise all degrade it |
| Thermal imaging | Surface temperature difference, which picks up a hot water line under a slab quickly | It reads heat, not water. A cold line leaking under tile in a cool room can be close to invisible, and a sunlit wall reads as a false hit |
| Camera inspection in a drain or sewer | Pipe material, diameter, the type of defect and the footage from the access point to it | EPA states it “cannot capture pipe condition below the water” and that the assessment “is subjective and can be error prone”. The line has to be cleaned and running low first |
Two things follow from that last row. A quick look down a cleanout is not a camera inspection: EPA's operations guidance puts the reach of that at the first 10 to 12 feet and notes it misses the invert, the bottom of the pipe where sags and cracks sit. A camera run through a line still full of water gives you footage, not a diagnosis. EPA's sequence is clean first, inspect after, with the record naming pipe size, pipe material and footage to each defect. EPA recommends camera work for lines 4 to 48 inches across, which a house lateral just scrapes into and the branch under your sink does not.
IBHS studied residential water loss claims and found 65 percent came from a failure of the plumbing supply material itself, against 18 percent from frozen pipes. Cost ran the other way: material failures averaged $4,296, a freeze and burst $8,189, and 39 percent of frozen claims landed in January. Those claims date from 1998 to 2005, so the dollars are old money. The ratio holds, which is why a January burst is a different conversation. On slab-built houses: 22 percent of supply material failures happened beneath the slab of homes with no basement.
We check static pressure before chasing anything, because high pressure quietly manufactures leaks all over a house at once. Prince William Water's utility standards require a pressure reducing device where working pressure exceeds 80 psi, and the Virginia Residential Code sets the same ceiling on static pressure. Watts, which makes the valves, treats anything over 60 psi as generally high and names leaking water heaters, banging pipework and dripping faucets among the symptoms. That is this utility's own standard, so do not assume it reads the same one county over.
Two things about that valve get stated wrongly almost everywhere. A reducing valve that has drifted is usually a rebuild, not a replacement: Watts calls its own valves life-of-mortgage products serviced with an inexpensive kit, the opposite of the ten-to-fifteen-year swap schedule you will read elsewhere. And once a reducing valve or check valve sits on the service the house is a closed system, so the water heater has nowhere to push water as it expands and the code requires a means of thermal expansion control. A waterlogged expansion tank reaches us as a weeping relief valve reported as a water heater leak.
Detection and repair are the same visit where the work allows, because we are a plumbing contractor and not a detection service. On permits, the straight answer: the Virginia Uniform Statewide Building Code requires one for alterations to the water supply and distribution system, the drainage system or the vent system, so a reroute is permitted work while swapping a fixture without touching pipe generally is not. Emergency work may start, with the application filed by the end of the first working day. We file it, and nothing is closed up before the inspector has looked.
Sometimes locating the leak is the easy part. One pinhole in old copper is a repair. The third pinhole in the same run is an argument for repiping, and we will say so even though the repair is the smaller invoice. Our office runs 7:00 to 17:00 and Jon takes the after-hours calls himself, so a person answers rather than a service. That is not a promise of a truck in your driveway at 3am.
One call covers plumbing and HVAC. Talk to somebody who has been doing this for decades.
