Stealthy Leakage

Somewhere in our house, water is escaping. I can hear it. At three in the morning I can detect the tiny whoosh from the pipes when nothing should be moving.

I’ve checked all the obvious places. Replaced a few likely suspects. But the noise remains. Now, normally I don’t have a problem finding out where water is coming from. Ceilings change shape, objects underneath the flow become unexpectedly glossy, or suddenly go mouldy. But this leak is stealthy. There is no evidence at all. Anywhere. Everything is just as it should be, apart from the sound.

At one point I started to doubt myself. However, Dave came round last night and he heard it too. And (and this is the clincher) he heard it stop when I turned the water off.  The prevailing wisdom is that a pipe underneath the floorboards somewhere downstairs is leaking straight down into the ground. In the fullness of time this probably means that we will have our own indoor swimming pool, followed shortly by a moat.

I hate having a problem I don’t know how to solve. If this was a programming fault I’d be bunging breakpoints in, adding debugging code and generally getting to the bottom of things. If it was a piece of hardware I’d be working out where best to hit it. But when a pipe just disappears into a wall it is kind of hard to discover what is going on. I think I might need to engage stronger powers than mine on this one, in other words it might be time to find a plumber…