A slab leak is a water line failing underneath the concrete your house sits on. Almost every home in Porter, Spring, Conroe and the surrounding area is built slab-on-grade, which means there's no crawlspace and no basement — when a supply line under there starts leaking, the first evidence is often a warm patch on the floor or a water bill that jumped for no reason.
Texas Plumber Connection locates and repairs slab leaks across north Houston, and there's no service fee to come out and find one.
The signs, roughly in the order people notice them
- A water bill that climbed with no change in how you use water
- The sound of running water when every fixture is off, usually noticeable at night
- A warm spot on the floor, which points specifically at the hot-water line
- Damp carpet, cupping wood, or a persistent musty smell in one area
- Reduced pressure throughout the house
- Cracks appearing in flooring or drywall as the soil under the slab washes out
The water meter test is the one homeowners can do themselves: shut off every fixture, note the meter reading, wait an hour without using water, and check it again. If it moved, water is going somewhere.
Why this happens so often in this part of Texas
Gulf Coast clay is the short answer. The soil under these slabs holds water and swells in a wet spring, then shrinks and pulls away in an August drought. That cycle moves the slab, and anything rigid running through or under it — copper supply lines in particular — gets stressed at the same points year after year.
Copper has a second problem here. Water chemistry across parts of north Harris and Montgomery County is aggressive enough to cause pinhole corrosion from the inside, and where a line is in direct contact with concrete rather than properly sleeved, abrasion does the rest. Homes built from the 1970s through the early 1990s in Porter Heights, River Plantation, Old Humble and the original Woodlands villages are the ones we're called to most.
Finding it without opening the whole floor
This is where the money is saved. We use electronic listening equipment, line tracing and pressure isolation to narrow the leak to a specific point before anything is cut. Isolating hot from cold and testing each side separately tells us which system has failed, and pressure testing confirms it rather than assuming.
Opening concrete on a guess is expensive and, more to the point, often wrong.
Your repair options
- Spot repair. Break out a small section of slab, expose the failed line, repair it, and restore the concrete and flooring. Best when the pipe is otherwise in good condition and this is a one-off.
- Reroute. Abandon the failed section under the slab and run a new line overhead through the attic and down the walls. Often the better value when the leak is in an awkward spot, and it takes that run out from under the concrete permanently.
- Repipe. If the house has already had slab leaks, or the camera and pressure testing suggest the whole system is at the same stage of life, replacing the supply system with Uponor PEX ends the cycle rather than deferring it.
We price the options side by side. A second slab leak in the same house within a couple of years is usually the system telling you which one it wants.
What we do
We confirm the leak exists, isolate hot from cold, locate the point electronically, show you where it is and what it will take to reach it, and give you the repair and reroute prices together before any concrete is touched. Permitting is handled with Montgomery County for unincorporated Porter and New Caney, or with the city in Conroe, Humble, Tomball and Oak Ridge North.
Serving Porter and the surrounding area
Porter, New Caney, Spring, The Woodlands, Conroe, Oak Ridge North, Cut and Shoot, Humble, Atascocita and Tomball. Estimates Monday through Saturday, 8am to 8pm, financing through Synchrony, and no service fee.
If your bill jumped or you can hear water running with everything off, call (832) 885-9820 — the sooner a slab leak is found, the less soil it washes out from under the foundation.