Water leaks and Ferrosols

Stu Pocknee

28 Jan 2025

general

Apparently our local city council is upgrading water meters to a remotely (?) monitored "smart" variety.

I only learned of this when my wife showed me the below letter.

It seems the readings are taken and stored at least hourly. Our usage pattern indicated a leak. That sucks, but it's kind of cool that the council can tell us. Especially as there was zero visual indication of leaking water anywhere on the property.

Turning off every tap on the property should stop the meter entirely. Not so ours, the last digit kept steadily incrementing.

We'd been gone for a week just prior to the notice (returning on a Saturday), so should have used zero water for at least 6 days. The water monitoring app said otherwise.

Bugger.

So where's the leak: Inside? Outside?

There is a master valve at the meter. This kills water to the property entirely.

Another valve is present at a manifold where water enters the house. By closing this one I should be able to localize the leak to either inside the house, or outside in the yard.

Good plan, except that when I checked I found the valve at the manifold only controlled water to part of the house. The other section was direct plumbed.

Fine. I'd use some spare "blue-line" pipe to temporarily route around the directly connected section so that I could shut off the whole house.

That worked. Almost. Disconnecting and reattaching the old poly-pipe fittings was asking for trouble. No matter how tight I tried to cinch the weathered plastic back together I couldn't stop the leaks.

Screw it. I might as well replace the whole manifold, this time altering the position of the valve to make whole house isolation possible.

I took a picture of the existing setup and headed to the hardware store.

Bunnings trip 1.

As soon as I got to the store I realized that the old style of poly-pipe fittings I had in use were no longer available, and new versions differed in various ways, including size. My photo wasn't going to be enough to judge the bits I would need.

Bugger.

I decided to buy just enough to shut the water off at the house temporarily, without trying to redo the whole manifold.

This worked (with not much leaking).

The meter was still ticking over. So the leak was outside.

By this time it was too late to go back to the hardware store. It would be no fun going without water for the night. I re-installed the original manifold. Pretty much every connection I had touched was now leaking.

See below.

The next day I shut the water off and removed the entire manifold (to take to the hardware store).

Bunnings trips 2 & 3.

It took me two trips and some experimentation to get the fittings (and more🤦) I needed for the new manifold.

At this point I could easily isolate the house completely.

Hard to believe that we could be losing 300+ liters per day and not see seepage, or extra green vegetation.

It's been a wet summer so everything is green.

I decided to check every junction I knew about as I figured connections were more likely to spring a leak than regular pipe sections.

The first junction turned up nothing.

The second was fine also.

The third took a lot more digging as I didn't know exactly where it was.

Yellow warning tape appeared under my mattock and shovel. I'd been present when we shifted the mains power line a decade ago, so I knew what the tape signified. I also knew there was internet fiber waiting to be sliced through somewhere close-by as well 😬.

I carefully moved on.

Suddenly the digging got very easy. The soil was damper than it had been. Sure enough, with another few shovel loads I could see water beginning to bubble up through the loosened earth.

The culprit!

At this point I was pretty happy as I knew replacing a simple 3-way Tee compression fitting would be quick and easy.

Bunnings trip 4.

Of course there was a hitch. When I returned with my Tee and removed the existing fitting I realized the old one was of a different type and had a slightly different method of pipe attachment. Without going into detail, it meant that the existing pipe was not quite long enough to simply switch components. I was going to have to join and lengthen at least one of the pipes.

Bunnings trip 5.

Actually, this time it was Mitre-10, because I was sick of going to Bunnings.

I got an inline coupler and, finally, I could close out the job.

So, file this under "Not Interesting" if you like; but for me the fact I can spill 300L/day into a spot in my yard for I-don't-know-how-long ¹ and have no idea it is happening is fascinating.

The soil is obviously well drained.

"Yep. Characteristic trait of a Red Ferrosol".

That was the rather spare opinion of my mate Biggsy, Senior Soil Scientist at the QDNRMMRRD. 🤷🤣

💦💦💦