Leak detection in Rainworth

Rainworth generates more leak callouts than anywhere else we cover, and the village's two housing types explain why they are so hard to pin down. The streets built for Rufford Colliery in the 1920s and 1930s have suspended timber floors, and the pipework beneath them has been extended, re-routed and added to for ninety years. Water leaving an old joint under one of those floors runs along the nearest joist until it finds somewhere to drop, which is routinely a room or two from the fault. The post-war housing off Warsop Lane is the opposite problem: heating pipe cast into a solid floor, where there is nothing to lift and nothing to see, and the only evidence is a pressure gauge that keeps falling. Neither announces itself. Both are straightforward to locate with the right equipment and very destructive to find without it.

Why leaks in Rainworth hide where they do

• Ninety years of altered pipework under suspended floors

  The colliery-era properties were plumbed for solid fuel and have been converted, extended and re-piped since. What is under the floorboards is rarely one continuous run — it is several eras of pipework joined together, and the joints between them are where the failures happen. Knowing that changes where you look first.

• Heating pipe buried in post-war solid floors

  The council-built housing off Warsop Lane was laid with the heating circuit in the screed. When one of those runs starts weeping, the pressure drops, the floor above warms very slightly, and there is nothing else to go on. Thermal imaging reads the pipe route straight through the floor covering, so the search narrows to a metre or so before anything is cut.

• Water that surfaces a long way from the fault

  Under a suspended floor, water follows the joists and the fall of the building rather than dropping straight down. The damp patch on a ceiling below, or the swollen skirting in the next room, marks where it left — not where it started. Lifting boards at the damp is the single most common wasted job we are called in after.

Leaks we trace most often in Rainworth

• Kirklington Road — leak traced two rooms from the damp

  Staining appearing at the base of a wall with no plumbing near it. The run was traced back under the suspended floor to a failed joint beneath the kitchen, and a single section of board was lifted rather than the whole hallway.

• Warsop Lane — buried heating circuit under a solid floor

  A sealed system needing topping up every fortnight with a dry discharge pipe outside. Thermal imaging picked up the run under the hall floor and the anomaly on it; we lifted one section of covering, replaced the failed length and reinstated.

• Southwell Road — pressure loss that was not a leak at all

  Persistent pressure drop on a colliery-era semi that turned out to be a failed expansion vessel rather than pipework. Testing before assuming saved the customer a floor and most of the cost.

For how we approach leak detection generally — what is included, how we price it and what happens on the day — see our leak detection page. For everything else we do in the area, seeour work in Rainworth.