Slab leaks in Orange County homes
Almost every home in Orange County sits on a concrete slab, with the water supply running underneath it. When one of those lines fails, the water has nowhere obvious to go — so it goes into the ground, into the slab, and eventually into your flooring.
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Signs to look for
- A warm patch on a tile or concrete floor, usually in one spot
- A water bill that climbed with no change in how you use water
- The sound of running water when everything is shut off
- Flooring that lifts, cups or separates in one area
- A damp or musty smell near the floor that will not go away
- Cracks appearing in tile grout or drywall as the slab shifts
Why they run for so long before anyone notices
A leak in a wall shows itself. A leak under six inches of concrete does not. The water saturates the soil beneath the slab first, then works sideways until it finds an edge — a joint, a crack, the perimeter of the foundation.
By the time it reaches something you can see, it has usually been running for weeks. That is the part homeowners find hardest to accept: the damage is not from today, it is from everything that happened before today.
What causes them here
Copper supply lines rubbing against concrete as they expand and contract, decades of it, until the wall of the pipe wears through. Soil chemistry that corrodes copper from the outside. And in homes from the 1960s and 1970s, original lines that have simply reached the end of their service life at the same time as their neighbours.
Fixing the source is only half of it
Repairing the line stops the water. It does not dry what the water already reached — the subfloor, the flooring adhesive, the base of the drywall and whatever is behind the baseboards. That part is restoration work, and it is what determines whether mold shows up three weeks later.