Leak tools

Picking the right tool

The tools fall into a few jobs. Some help you decide: whether a property looks like one our visit applies to, which methods a survey might involve, or what to ask any firm before agreeing to a price. Others help you keep track of things, such as how a stain changes from one day to the next, or what a water meter does overnight. A few simply save you writing, by turning the details you enter into a letter for whoever else is involved in the building.

Start with whichever matches the question in front of you. Each page shows how its answer is worked out, so you can check the reasoning yourself.

Getting a sound result

Fill each field from what is in front of you today, and skip any you cannot answer. A guessed figure goes in as fact and comes back out as a polished but misleading result.

What a checker really does is narrow your options. Walls and floors are opaque to it, so read the outcome as a prompt to do something rather than a verdict on the cause. A tool that closes by telling you to phone someone straight away is working as designed; that advice is the answer, not a gap in it.

Keep a record of what you enter and what comes back, with the date beside it. If a symptom later changes, a dated note shows when the change began, and that is often the detail a surveyor, a landlord or an insurer asks about first.

Every result here is a starting point for your own judgement. Where a page suggests booking a visit, it is because the checks you ran cannot settle the matter from a distance; where it suggests waiting and watching, repeat the check under the same conditions so the two results can be compared fairly.

Some of these pages ask about the building itself: how old the pipework is, whether the heating is a sealed system, which floor the damp is on. Answer as best you can, and if you are renting or managing a property for someone else, ask them before you guess. Rough answers are fine where a field says so, but an invented one is worse than none.

Tools that deal with money work only from the numbers you type in. Check those against a real bill, a policy schedule or a written quote before you rely on what comes back, since a small slip in one figure carries through every line that follows it.

When you finish with a tool, close the tab and come back later if the situation changes. Water behaves differently from one day to the next, and a fresh run with new observations is more useful than clinging to an earlier answer.

None of this replaces a proper inspection. Think of the tools as a way to arrive at that conversation prepared: you will know what you have seen, roughly when it began, and what you would like to find out, which makes any call or visit that follows more efficient for everyone involved.

If two tools seem to disagree, trust neither completely. Go back to what you can actually see and measure, note the difference, and bring both results to whoever you speak to next.

A sensible order to work through them

Someone who has only just spotted a stain gains most from the evidence log and the overnight meter test, because those start a record while the problem is still small. A homeowner comparing firms will get more from the quote checklist and the break-even calculator, which turn a quote into numbers that can be set side by side. A tenant or leaseholder will probably want the letter generator, so that a landlord or managing agent receives the facts in a tidy form.

The scope check and the methods picker suit the stage just before you book. The first tells you whether a property falls under the single detection price or needs a separate quote, and the second gives a sense of which instruments a visit is likely to bring along for the symptom you described.

What none of them can see

A calculator has no view of the cavity behind a tiled wall or the void under a bath. It cannot hear a pinhole in a heating pipe or tell a failed seal from condensation. Those questions are why instruments such as acoustic listening, thermal imaging and tracer gas exist, and why the tools here stop short of naming a cause.

Use them to organise what you already know. Take photographs in the same light, measure a stain against a coin or a ruler, and write down the time each meter reading was taken. Small habits like these make a later conversation with a surveyor quicker and more precise.

It also helps to save the pages you used. A note of which tool you ran, the figures you gave it and the answer it returned lets someone else follow your reasoning without starting from scratch, and it shows at a glance whether the picture has changed since the last time you looked.