Burst pipes and leaks
traced across Chatswood

Turn the water off. In a house that is the meter at the front boundary, clockwise until it stops. In an apartment it is usually an isolation valve inside your lot, often in the laundry or under the sink, and if you cannot find it the building manager can shut the riser. If water is anywhere near a light fitting or the switchboard, kill the power first. Then open the lowest tap you have to drain the pressure out of the pipework rather than into a ceiling.

Almost never directly above it, and in a unit block usually not even in your apartment. Water runs along the top of a ceiling sheet, along a joist or down a service duct until it finds somewhere to drop, so the visible stain can be metres from the source and a floor up. In practice a ceiling leak in a flat is most often a failed shower waterproofing membrane or a flexi hose in the apartment above. That makes it a common property or upstairs-lot question, not automatically yours.

It turns on where the failure is. A flexi hose or a waste pipe inside the upstairs lot is generally that owner's. Waterproofing membranes and the common pipework in the slab or the risers are generally the owners corporation's. The reason people end up arguing is that nobody has established which it is. Thermal imaging and a moisture meter answer it without opening anything, and we put the finding in writing for the strata manager.

There was usually warning. In the older houses here the common story is copper from the post-war decades developing pinholes, or original cast iron waste corroding through, and the early signs are falling pressure, a stain that comes and goes, or a water bill drifting up. In anything built or renovated in the last fifteen years it is more often a braided flexi hose reaching the end of its ten-year service life, and those give no warning at all.

That is the whole point of doing it properly, and it matters more here than most places. Chatswood sits on sandstone that is often within a metre or two of the surface, so an exploratory trench is not a shovel job, it is rock work. We use acoustic listening along the line and thermal imaging where hot water is involved, so we open one spot rather than search. On this ground that is frequently the difference between a repair and a project.

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 takes ten minutes to establish. In an apartment check your own isolation valve first, because a running toilet cistern is the most common and least dramatic answer. Sydney Water has a concealed leak allowance in some circumstances and it needs the repair documented, so keep the paperwork.

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 exclude damage from a leak that has been seeping gradually rather than bursting. In strata there are two policies in play, the building policy and your contents, and which responds depends on the same question as above: where the failure was. We document it with photographs because that is what both insurers will ask for.