Leak Detection North Christchurch

North Christchurch leak searches, from Papanui to the Northwood slabs

Across North Christchurch the age of the house tells us where to start looking. Papanui has homes from the early 1900s onward, many on timber floors with older metal supply pipe that corrodes from the inside. Bishopdale is mostly single-storey brick and timber housing from the 1960s and later, where the run from the toby to the house is often the original line laid when the section was built. In those suburbs we usually begin with the subfloor and the buried supply pipe.

Redwood and Northwood are different. Redwood was raupō swamp before it was drained, and newer parts such as Regent's Park and Redwood Springs date from the 2000s. Northwood went up from 2000 on old orchard land. Homes from that period are more likely to be built on concrete with plastic pipe in the slab or walls, so acoustic listening and thermal imaging do most of the work, and a warm strip across a tiled floor is a common first clue for a hot line.

Frost ties the area together. The northern suburbs sit on open plains near the airport, which records about 50 nights a year below freezing, and a split fitting in a garage or outside wall may only start dripping once it thaws. Belfast and Papanui also have commercial properties with boundary backflow devices, where we test each service separately.

Local tip: After a hard frost in Bishopdale or Northwood, take a meter reading before anyone showers and again an hour later; a moving dial points to a pipe that split overnight.