Supply pipe under a paddock to a lane-end cottage
The property
A brick cottage set well back from a lane on the village edge, fed by blue plastic pipe running across a paddock from a roadside meter.
The problem
The water company had written about a steady overnight flow. Nothing indoors was wet, and nobody knew which way the pipe crossed the grass.
How we found it
Closing the indoor stop tap showed the loss was outdoors. Plastic muffles sound, so the microphone's faint reading was checked with tracer gas, which rose through the turf at the same spot.
The outcome
A photographed peg marked the spot, so one small pit replaced a trench across the grass. The repair was quoted separately, and a full day's detection had been agreed beforehand.