A Bill That Will Not Settle
Month on month the water charge climbs while nothing about the household changed. The auto-fill has been quietly paying for the leak all along.
Home / Val de Vie / Pool Leak Detection
On a big, well-irrigated estate garden, a damp patch proves nothing and an auto-fill valve hides everything. So we do not work from wet ground. We rule out evaporation, pressure-test the pool's suction and return lines independently of the irrigation, and trace the loss to one chalked point before anything is opened.
Tell us what you are seeing, the level, the bill or a wet patch, and we will phone you back with a clear, upfront price before we start.
Rarely as a falling level. On an estate home it usually arrives as a number, a noise or a patch of garden.
Month on month the water charge climbs while nothing about the household changed. The auto-fill has been quietly paying for the leak all along.
Auto-fill off, bucket on the step, both levels marked, 24 hours. Whatever the pool has lost beyond the bucket is water going somewhere it should not.
On the bigger stands here the suction and return lines travel a fair distance to the pump housing. More buried metres means more joints, and joints are where they fail.
Air blowing back through the returns, or a pump that will not hold prime, means the suction side is drawing air in exactly where water is escaping.
A bed that stays soft between irrigation cycles is worth testing. On a garden watered this well, wet ground alone is not proof of anything.
A pool that drops to one level and then holds is showing you the height of the fault, usually the skimmer throat, the light niche or a return fitting.
Val de Vie sits on the Berg River between Paarl and Franschhoek and is almost entirely modern, which sounds like it should mean fewer pool problems. In one sense it does: the cracked, shifted marbelite shell that explains so many leaks in old-town Paarl is not what we find on this estate, because these pools have not spent thirty years riding clay soil that swells through winter and shrinks through summer. The structure is usually fine. What fails is a fitting or a pipe, and on the larger stands here the buried suction and return lines run a long way out to the pump housing, which simply gives them more joints to let go at.
The harder problem is telling a pool leak apart from everything else that puts water into the ground on this estate. The gardens are extensively irrigated, so a soft, green patch near a pool surround is genuinely ambiguous: it could be the pool's return line, or it could be a sprinkler line running past it doing exactly what it was installed to do. People dig on that patch and find the wrong pipe. We would rather answer the question properly, by isolating the pool's suction and return lines and pressure-testing them independently of the irrigation, so we can say which system is actually losing water before a spade comes out.
The last thing that shapes the job here is that the leak often runs unnoticed for months. An auto-fill valve replaces the loss daily without comment, and with a fair number of these homes let out or standing empty for part of the year, nobody is watching the level anyway. By the time it surfaces, it surfaces as a bill. Once we have pressure-tested and know which line is losing, we trace it acoustically to a single chalked square metre and open only that, the same method behind our pool leak detection across Paarl and our in-house leak detection service.
Our base is in Paarl in Lemoenkloof, a short run down the R301, so Val de Vie, Pearl Valley and Boschenmeer sit inside our ordinary working day. Everything else we do on the estate is on our Val de Vie plumber page.
What matters when the work is happening around a garden and a pool that cost what these did.
The trace is priced before we begin and the repair quoted separately once we know what has actually failed.
A short run down the R301 from Paarl, so coming out to the estate is part of our ordinary week.
Gate access booked before we arrive and the work kept inside estate hours, without you having to arrange it.
If the house is let or you are away, you get pictures of what we found and where, not just an invoice.
What owners on the estate ask us most before booking a pool leak trace.
Yes, and on this estate that is the most common way a pool leak announces itself. An auto-fill valve replaces whatever escapes before you ever see the level move, so the loss goes straight onto the bill instead of the waterline. Switch the auto-fill off for 24 hours and run a bucket test. If the pool drops further than the bucket standing in it, the difference is a leak rather than a Boland summer. Our guide to the bucket test sets it out step by step.
That is exactly the question worth answering before anybody digs, because on a heavily irrigated estate garden a damp patch proves very little on its own. We isolate the pool's suction and return lines and pressure-test them independently of the irrigation, so we can say whether the water in that bed is coming from your pool pipework or from a sprinkler line running past it. Guessing from the wet patch is how people end up lifting the wrong stretch of garden.
Nearly always the pipework or a fitting. Val de Vie is almost entirely modern, so these pools have not had decades of clay soil moving underneath them the way an old marbelite pool in town has. The leaks we find here sit at the skimmer throat, the light niche and its conduit, the main drain, or somewhere along the buried suction and return lines. On the larger stands those runs out to the pump housing are long, which means more joints and more places to fail.
We pressure-test the suction and return lines separately to establish which one is losing, then trace that line with acoustic listening equipment until we can chalk the exact point on the surface. Only that one spot is opened. The planting, paving and decking on these properties are a real part of what the house is worth, so the testing exists precisely so that nothing is lifted on a hunch.
You do not need to be there. We book contractor access at the gate before we arrive and keep the work inside the hours the estate allows. A good number of the homes we attend at Val de Vie are let out or stood empty for part of the year, so working to an absent owner and reporting back with photographs of what we found is normal for us rather than a special arrangement.
We do. The trace is priced before we start and the repair quoted separately once the fault is identified, so the two costs stay visible. Skimmer throats, light niches, fittings and buried suction and return lines are all work we carry out ourselves. If the finding turns out to be structural rather than plumbing, we will tell you that straight rather than sell a repair that will not hold.
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