Underground Water Mains in San Jose, CA
The water service is the line from your meter to your house. Most people never think about it, which is reasonable, because it is buried and it usually works. When it stops working it does so quietly: the bill climbs, or a patch of lawn stays green through a dry spell, or the pressure in the house drops off and never comes back.
Older San Jose services were run in galvanized steel or thin-wall copper. Both have a working life, and in our soil that life is measured in decades rather than forever. Galvanized closes up with rust from the inside. Copper starts weeping at the joints, or develops pinholes that soak into the ground where nobody sees them.
We locate the leak before we dig, so we open the ground once rather than chasing it down the length of the run. New services go in as copper or PE depending on the site, get tied in at the meter, pressure-tested, and then the yard goes back the way we found it as closely as we can manage.
When people call us about this
- Water bill has climbed with no change in how much you use
- A patch of yard stays wet or unusually green
- The meter keeps turning with every fixture in the house shut off
- Pressure through the whole house has dropped off
- Discolored water at every tap, not just one
Questions we get asked
How do you find the leak without digging up the yard?+
By narrowing it down before a shovel comes out. First we confirm the leak is actually in the service line rather than inside the house, by isolating at the meter and at the point where the line enters the building. Then we trace the route of the run, because a service line rarely goes where people assume it does, and pinpoint the failure acoustically and by how the line behaves under pressure. Only then do we dig, and we dig at that spot. This matters more on a long run, because chasing a leak along a hundred feet of pipe means opening a hundred feet of yard.
Do I have to replace the whole line, or can you repair the spot?+
Both are legitimate answers and it depends on what the line is made of and why it failed. A newer line with physical damage in one place (something struck it, or a root levered a joint apart) is a genuine spot repair and we will do that. An old galvanized service that has started weeping is a different case: the whole run is the same age, in the same soil, in the same condition, so a repair typically buys a year or two before the next hole appears somewhere else along it. We will tell you plainly which situation you are looking at, including when a repair is fine and you should keep your money.
Will the yard be wrecked?+
Less than people expect. We keep the trench as narrow as the job allows, keep the excavated soil on boards rather than across the lawn, and put it back and compact it properly rather than mounding it and leaving. Where the run is long or the surface genuinely matters, such as established planting, a driveway or a walkway, we can often pull the new line through instead of trenching the full length, which reduces it to two small pits. What we will not do is promise your yard will look untouched, because a pipe has to come out of the ground somewhere. We will tell you before we start exactly where we expect to open it.
Further reading: 5 Signs of a Hidden Water Leak in Your San Jose Home.
Describe it to us and we will tell you what it is.
Phone consultations do not cost anything. If it turns out to be something you can sort out yourself, we will say so.
Related work
Underground Water Mains across the South Bay
We cover San Jose and the cities around it. Pick your area for what tends to go wrong in houses like yours.