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Slab Leak

Water escaping under a slab keeps going until somebody locates and stops it, and over a high water table the damp it creates travels sideways well before anything shows on the floor.

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When this becomes an emergency

What a pro does

The first job on a suspected slab leak here is confirming there's a slab at all. South of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal the housing stock splits between slab-on-grade and raised crawlspace, sometimes along the same street, and a leak dripping into a vented crawlspace behaves nothing like one trapped under concrete. With the foundation settled, location comes from listening equipment and pressure isolation rather than guesswork, because a wrong guess means cutting concrete for nothing. Corrosion is the usual cause across Delmarva. Shallow groundwater from the Columbia aquifer tends to be soft and mildly acidic, with little alkalinity to buffer it, and water like that works on the inside of copper tubing until a pinhole opens. Detection is harder on a well property, since there's no monthly bill to flag the loss; the tell is a pump starting on its own at 3 in the morning. Depending on where the line runs, the repair might be a targeted opening in the slab or an overhead reroute that abandons the buried section entirely.

Frequently asked questions

Plenty of them do. Basements are uncommon once you're south of the canal, because the water table sits too close to the surface to dig one economically, so builders went to slab-on-grade or a raised crawlspace instead. Development around Millsboro, Berlin and Salisbury since the 1970s leans heavily slab, while older farmhouse stock is more often crawlspace.
Water chemistry. Shallow groundwater here is naturally low in dissolved minerals and slightly acidic, which sounds harmless and is in fact aggressive toward copper over years of contact. The tubing thins from the inside until a pinhole opens, which is why these leaks appear in houses where nothing was ever disturbed.
By listening to the pump. On a well, the pressure tank and pump stand in for the meter as a diagnostic, and a pump that starts with every fixture closed is saying water is leaving the system somewhere. Sections of the supply can also be isolated and pressure tested one at a time to narrow the location down.
Usually not. Detection equipment narrows the spot to a small area before anything gets cut, and the opening in the slab is only as large as access demands. Where the line runs badly or the pipe is old enough that a second pinhole is likely, rerouting the run overhead is often chosen instead of repeating concrete work later.

Slab Leak?

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