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Plumbing · Georgia
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Slab Leak

Water escaping under a slab keeps working at the soil supporting the foundation, so shut the main and call rather than waiting to see whether the wet spot spreads.

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When this becomes an emergency

What a pro does

Slab-on-grade is the default across most of Georgia, which puts the supply lines in or under the concrete instead of in a basement where you'd see them fail. Location work comes before any cutting. A plumber isolates the leak to the hot or cold side, pressure tests, and then works with acoustic listening gear and often a thermal camera to fix the spot within a foot or so, because opening concrete on an educated guess is an expensive way to be wrong. What happens next is a real decision rather than a formality. Cutting the slab at that point and repairing the section is the direct route. Rerouting the run overhead through the attic and dropping it back down inside a wall abandons the buried line entirely, which makes sense when the pipe is old enough that a second failure is likely anyway. Copper laid decades ago in red clay tends to pit from the outside in, so a plumber's read on the rest of that pipe drives the recommendation as much as the leak itself does.

Frequently asked questions

By sound and by temperature. Pressurized water escaping under a slab makes a distinctive noise that listening equipment picks up through concrete, and a hot-side leak warms a patch of floor that a thermal camera reads clearly. Those two together usually put the location inside a foot before anything is cut.
Neither is automatically better. A single failure in otherwise sound pipe is often worth repairing where it sits. A line that's already pitted along its length, or a leak sitting under a kitchen island or a tiled hallway, frequently makes an overhead reroute the more sensible answer.
That's a question for your insurance provider, since policies differ considerably on the pipe itself, on access to it, and on the resulting damage. Getting the leak documented in place before repairs begin is worth doing regardless of how the claim turns out.
It contributes. Clay soil takes on water and swells, then shrinks back through a dry spell, and a slab riding on that movement puts stress on anything rigid running through it. Add decades of damp soil against bare copper and you get the pitting that opens most of these leaks.

Slab Leak?

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