The cost-effective way to find leaks at your commercial rental property

Winter can be a real pain when it comes to causing costly damage to commercial rental properties.

An escape of water from a burst pipe may have created a small puddle, but it can also be responsible for weeks of upheaval and months of voids in your income ledger.

Then there’s finding and fixing the leak…

Water travels, so it often doesn’t first appear at the point nearest to the leak. Gravity means it flows downwards, even if the incline is slight, which means that in many commercial rental properties where rooms aren’t continuously used, it can take many months to identify an escape of water. During this time, any water that has travelled will have substantially elevated your (or your tenant’s) water bill and left a trail of destruction in its wake.

Once a leak in your commercial rental property has been identified, your first task is getting a plumber to find and fix the leak. Skirting boards come off, holes are channelled in plasterboard, and carpets, floor tiles and floorboards are taken up. Often, this continues until the culprit is located and can be repaired.

Then there’s the repair work, fixing, replacing and making good everything damaged whilst locating the leak.

This sounds like a whole lot of unnecessary work, expense and time when your commercial property can’t be used and isn’t being paid for.

At Rainbow International, we use technology to find leaks faster. Using one of three different techniques, we’re able to identify leaky pipes without leaving a trail of destruction behind us.

3 different ways we can identify your leaky pipe faster

Thermal Imaging

This is where we use a thermal imaging camera to see temperature changes within walls, pipes and floors. Leaking water is typically a different temperature to other building materials, and this temperature variation shows up on thermal imaging cameras. These cameras are very advanced and are able to detect slight variations in temperature. Because these are non-invasive, we can usually detect the leak with minimal excavation work, meaning, once the leak is fixed and the area dried, your commercial property should be ready for occupation once more.

Acoustic Testing

In certain situations where thermal imaging isn’t likely to be effective because of the conditions within the building structure (such as pipes buried very deep), we can use specialist acoustic listening devices to hear the tiny vibrations caused as water escapes from an exit point.

Tracer Gas

This is a more involved process and is therefore used as a last resort. We drain the water from the suspected system and introduce a tracer gas made up of 95% nitrogen and 5% hydrogen. The hydrogen will escape from the pipe as it’s the smallest and lightest molecule and can then be detected by an extremely sensitive gas detector.

If you or your tenants suspect an escape of water and you’d like help to find the cause of it with minimal risk of damage, give us a call on our 24/7 hotline – 01624 422 488. Our specialist leak detection teams will be able to come and advise you on the best way to identify the source of the leak with as little upheaval as possible. With over 60 branches of Rainbow around the UK, we’re bound to have a branch near you.