Burst pipes and pinhole
leaks traced across Manly

Turn the water off at the meter, usually at the front boundary, clockwise until it stops. If water is anywhere near a light fitting, a power point or the switchboard, kill the power at the main switch first. Then open the lowest tap in the house, typically an outside garden tap or the laundry, so the pressure in the pipework drains out there rather than into a ceiling. Those three things take a minute and they decide most of what this costs.

It is a tiny perforation through the wall of a copper pipe, and it is the characteristic coastal failure. Salt-laden air strips the protective oxide layer off copper, corrosion keeps going instead of self-limiting, and eventually it punches through at a point rather than splitting the pipe. The result seeps slowly, often for weeks or months, frequently inside a wall or under a floor where nobody sees it until there is a stain or a smell.

The industry figure for copper is fifty to seventy years. Coastal Sydney sits at the low end of that, because metal in a salt environment corrodes something like five to ten times faster than the same metal inland. That does not mean your pipework is about to fail. It means that if the house is of a certain age and nobody has ever replaced a run, the honest expectation should be the lower number rather than the upper one.

That is the classic pinhole presentation. Turn every tap and appliance off and watch the meter: if the dial is still moving, water is going somewhere it should not, and that settles it in ten minutes. Do not assume a hidden leak is small just because nothing has appeared. A pinhole running continuously into a wall cavity or a sub-floor does more damage over three months than a burst does in an hour, precisely because nobody responds to it.

No, and this catches people out. Salt does not need contact with seawater to reach your plumbing. It travels on the air through open windows, vents and the roof space, settles in wall cavities and under floors, then holds moisture against whatever is there. That is why we find corrosion on pipework well inside the building envelope, nowhere near an external wall.

That is the whole point of doing it properly, and on a seeping pinhole it matters more than on a burst. We use acoustic listening along the line and thermal imaging where hot water is involved, which locates the failure rather than the damp patch. On a slow leak the water has usually travelled some distance from the source before it surfaces, so opening the stain is a good way to cut a hole in the wrong place.

Usually the damage is and the pipe itself usually is not. Most policies cover water damage to the building and contents from a sudden burst, exclude the cost of repairing the failed pipe, and, importantly here, exclude damage from a leak that has been seeping gradually rather than bursting. Since gradual seeping is exactly what coastal corrosion produces, acting early is not just cheaper, it is often the difference between a claim and no claim. We document what failed and why, with photographs.