If the Leak Cannot Be Located: What You Pay on the Visit

How the fee works when a search ends

A detection visit closes with one of four results, and the fee follows from which. First, a leak is located inside your property. Second, a leak is located but belongs to another party. Third, the survey shows nothing is leaking. Fourth, and this is the only one that changes the bill, water is plainly escaping inside your own walls and floors and the search still cannot pin it down.

In a single line, the policy reads: No find, no fee waives the detection fee only when a live leak inside your own property cannot be located. It is narrow on purpose. A promise that covers every outcome cannot be kept by anyone, and a customer gets more from limits stated plainly than from a headline that falls apart on contact. The sections below take each limit in turn. No VAT is charged.

Only the detection visit is being discussed here. That visit is priced at one fixed price of £480, every method included, agreed before we attend, and the pricing page lays out the detail. Mending the fault is a different job with its own written quote, and this policy never reaches it.

Result one: a live leak in your own property that stays hidden

Here, and only here, the detection fee is dropped. Three conditions must all be true. There has to be evidence that water is escaping at present. The leak has to sit inside your own property. And once the methods have been applied properly, the team still cannot say where the water is leaving the pipework.

Evidence matters because being sure there is a leak is not the same as showing one. A meter that keeps turning with every tap shut, a heating circuit that sags in pressure overnight, or a ceiling stain that spreads on a dry day all count. A smell, an old mark that has not altered or a hunch do not, and they fall under result three.

The property condition matters because with your consent the team can search every run of pipe and every cavity inside it. Water beyond your boundary cannot be searched the same way, and the policy does not claim it can. When a full search of your own pipework fails to locate a leak that is demonstrably live, the fee is not charged. As no VAT is charged, there is no tax line to add either.

• Water is demonstrably escaping now.
• The pipework in question is inside your own property.
• The finished search still cannot say where.
• In that case, and no other, the fee is dropped.

Result two: the leak is real but belongs to someone else

Some searches end with a firm answer that points away from you. The stain on your kitchen ceiling is coming from the flat upstairs. The damp on the hall floor is a shared riser feeding the entire block. The garden pipe that keeps losing water lies on the utility company's side of the line. Each time, the leak has been found, which is what a visit is for.

So a leak shown to be a neighbour's, a shared riser's or the water company's main counts as located and the fee stands. The work was carried out and you now hold something usable: whose responsibility it is, and the evidence to prove it. If the water comes from upstairs, a landlord, a managing agent or an insurer will often ask for exactly that paperwork first.

This is where the written report earns its keep. A clear note of what turned up, where, and how it was verified lets you approach the right party without a debate about whether any leak exists. The price is the one agreed before attendance. No VAT is charged.

Result three: nothing is leaking

Plenty of people are certain about a leak and turn out to be mistaken. Condensation beading on a cold pipe can pass for a drip. A damp wall may be rising damp, a worn window seal or a gutter that overflows. A meter can creep when a cistern refills slowly. A boiler that drops pressure can simply have a tired expansion vessel. If a proper survey establishes that no leak exists, the water has been accounted for or excluded as a cause, and that is a finding in its own right.

This is charged in full, since ruling a leak out is the very thing you asked to have done. After a week of worrying about something behind the bath, you now know with readings in hand that the space is dry, and the search for the genuine cause can move on. The effort was identical to a visit that finds a leak. No VAT is charged.

It is also the fairest outcome to state beforehand. Waiving the fee here would reward the wrong behaviour: searches would be pointless to carry through, and every other visit would have to cost more to cover them. The team would rather say plainly that nothing is leaking than manufacture a find.

Three illustrations

These scenarios are invented to show the rules at work and are not real jobs. Time on site plays no part in any of them, because the detection price does not move with it. Each ends by saying what is paid for detection. No VAT is charged.

A flat with a stained ceiling comes first. The resident's meter keeps moving with all taps closed, so the leak is live. The team pressure tests each circuit, listens, images the walls thermally and uses tracer gas on the one run that cannot be eliminated. The readings stay inconclusive and the live leak is not located. The fee is dropped. Tracer gas is part of the visit, so it never shows up as an extra line.

Next, a ground floor flat with a wet bathroom ceiling. The stain widens whenever the neighbour above fills a bath, which establishes that it is live. The search finds a failed waste joint in their bathroom, with water running along a joist to your ceiling. It is located, it is not yours, and the detection price applies. The report goes to the managing agent.

Last, a house where radiators lose pressure and the owner fears a hidden leak beneath the floor. The survey tests the circuit under pressure, listens, maps moisture and images the floorboards. The circuit holds, the floor is dry and the pressure loss comes from an expansion vessel that needs recharging. Nothing is leaking, the detection price applies, and the owner has an answer.

The reasoning behind the limits

Each limit marks a point where dropping the fee would be wrong or impossible to apply evenly. The waiver exists for the single case in which the team did the work and could not give you a position on a leak inside your own property, because that is the only time you paid for effort and received nothing back.

A leak next door, in a shared riser or in a water company main has still been located, so the visit did its job. A survey that proves nothing is leaking has also given you an answer. Treating a useful negative as a failure would pull the team towards finding something, which is the opposite of honest detection.

There is a plain cost reason too. A policy that dropped the fee every time would be paid for by someone, and that someone would be each customer whose leak was found, through a higher price. A tight policy keeps the price straight. No VAT is charged.

Where the waiver stops

Only the detection fee is involved. A repair, opening up and making good, and commercial or multi-unit buildings sit outside it, and it is not a broader promise. The repair itself, opening up and making good, commercial or multi-unit buildings, and underground work that needs a different set-up are quoted separately, in writing, before any work starts.

It also does not apply to a mere suspicion. If nothing shows that water is escaping now, the visit still tests the property thoroughly, but the likelier finding is result three and the detection price applies. That is why the first step on the how it works page is taking a meter reading: it turns a suspicion into evidence.

Nor does it alter what a visit contains. The same methods are used whatever the result, and the full list is on the what is included page. No VAT is charged.

Checking your own visit against the policy

Afterwards, three questions show which result applied. Was a leak found? Where was it? And was there evidence at the outset that water was escaping now? If a leak was found, wherever it was, the detection price is charged. If it was not located, the evidence was live and the property was your own, the remaining question is whether the search was carried through to its end.

A well run visit finishes with a plain statement of the result and the reason for it. You should be able to repeat it in one sentence: located and charged, not located and waived, or ruled out and charged. If the statement is vague, ask for it in writing together with the evidence behind each step. The report should record what was tested, what the readings were and what was concluded.

Should your visit not match the policy as written here, tell us through the contact page with the date and what you were told. A policy is only as good as its application, and an honest account of these results is the best check on it. No VAT is charged.

• Located and charged: a leak was found, wherever it was.
• Not located and waived: a live leak inside your own property could not be pinned down.
• Ruled out and charged: the survey showed that nothing is leaking.

Before the team arrives: build the evidence

The better the evidence at the start, the clearer the result. Shut the stop tap and see whether the symptom stops, read the meter, leave every tap off for twenty minutes and read it again, and photograph the stain or drip with the date. Proof that water is escaping now is what moves a case from suspicion to confirmed, and confirmed is what the waiver depends on.

If water is escaping and you cannot contain it, stop it first and then arrange a visit. If you smell gas at any point, leave the property and ring the National Gas Emergency Service on 0800 111 999. Water can wait for the engineer. Gas cannot.