Buried supply lines
The run between your meter and the house. Located acoustically and by correlating between two points on the line.
Home / Leak Detection
Leak detection in Durban starts at the meter, because the meter is the boundary between a loss that is yours and a loss that is the City's. We locate it with acoustics and pressure testing before anything gets opened, then price the repair separately.
Tell us what made you suspect it. A meter that moves with the taps closed, a bill that has climbed, a damp patch or a warm spot on a floor all point at different things and get traced differently.
Different losses leave different evidence, so they are found different ways. A pool leak is its own problem and has its own page.
The run between your meter and the house. Located acoustically and by correlating between two points on the line.
Traced with thermal difference and moisture mapping where there is not enough flow to hear anything.
Isolating a circuit and holding it under pressure proves which section has lost integrity, without guesswork.
A dripping overflow is a measurable loss and often the whole answer. Checked before anyone goes looking underground.
A cistern passing water into the pan runs continuously and silently. It is the cheapest thing to find and the easiest to miss.
Where it is, how deep, how it was established, and dated. That is what an insurer or a body corporate will accept.
eThekwini's water losses are not a rumour and they are not small. Non-revenue water stood at 37% in 2013, was reported at 58% in January 2024, at 53.1% on a rolling twelve month basis in March 2025, at 52.9% that November, and at 65% for June 2026. The norm the City itself cites is 15% to 30%. The loss is valued at around R2 billion a year.
Almost everybody who hears those numbers draws the wrong conclusion from them, which is that a high bill is probably the City's fault. It is an understandable reading and it is the opposite of how metering works. Your meter counts water that passes it. Everything lost before that point is lost on the municipal side and appears in the City's accounts, not on yours. That enormous figure is a story about the network, and it has nothing to do with the number on your statement.
Which leaves a sharper and less comfortable point. If your account has climbed and your usage has not, the water is going somewhere after your connection, on your property, and you are paying for every litre of it. There is no scenario in which a municipal loss shows up on a domestic bill. The boundary is the meter, and the boundary decides who pays.
Durban then supplies a specific reason why the leak is likely to be a slow one. A rationed network empties and refills, and buried runs take that cycle repeatedly: air, scour and a pressure spike each time the void closes. Pipework treated that way tends not to split dramatically. It develops a pinhole at its weakest joint, loses a little continuously, and shows up as a bill that has been creeping for six months rather than as water coming up through the lawn.
So do the two hour test before you contact anybody, including us. Close every tap, switch the geyser off, read the meter, wait two hours without using water, and read it again. If the dial has moved you have a leak on your side and a number to prove it. If it has not, you have saved yourself the cost of a trace, and the fault is somewhere else entirely.
Five things that cost nothing and sometimes end the matter.
Locating first, opening second. In that order the repair is small and in the right place.
The first test separates a municipal loss from yours, because there is no point tracing a leak that is not on your property.
Circuits are isolated and pressure tested one at a time, so the search area shrinks before any equipment goes on the ground.
Acoustic listening, correlation and thermal imaging put a mark on the ground, with a depth, before anything is broken.
You get the written location and the repair price as two separate things, so you can take the repair elsewhere if you want to.
What it costs first, then how to tell whether you actually have one.
Tracing is a service in its own right rather than a free look, because it takes equipment and time, so it is priced as a job and not as a call-out. The trade's national guide figures are a R450 to R650 call-out and R450 to R850 an hour excluding VAT, and a domestic trace normally sits inside a small number of hours. You are told the figure before anyone is dispatched. The reason it is worth paying separately is arithmetic: tracing costs a fraction of what it costs to open a slab or a driveway in the wrong place, and the wrong place is where guessing puts you.
It means water is moving past your connection point while nothing in the house is calling for it, and that is the definition of a leak on your side. Do the check properly before you contact anyone: close every tap, switch the geyser off, and note the meter reading. Leave it two hours with nobody using water and read it again. If it has moved, the loss is yours and it is being billed to you. If it has not moved, the problem is a supply or pressure issue rather than a leak, and the water pressure repairs page is the right one.
Because of where the meter sits. eThekwini's non-revenue water has run above 50% for years, was reported at 52.9% in November 2025 and at 65% for June 2026, against an accepted norm of 15% to 30%. It is a genuine crisis and it is worth about R2 billion a year. But nearly all of that loss is on the City's side of your connection, upstream of your meter, and it is not charged to you. Your meter only counts what passes it. So the municipal figure explains the queues at the call centre, and it does not explain your account.
Because of what a rationed network does to them. When supply is throttled and restored, a buried run empties and refills, and each refill brings a slug of air and a pressure spike as the void closes. That is the same mechanism that damaged 72 air valves on the City's own bulk line to Phoenix. A buried pipe rarely bursts under this. It develops a pinhole at whatever joint or thin spot took the worst of it, which is why the classic Durban leak is not a fountain in the garden but a meter that creeps and a water bill that climbs over months.
Not to find it. That is the entire point of tracing. Acoustic listening on the pipe run, correlation between two points, and pressure testing an isolated section will normally put a leak inside a small area without anything being opened. Opening up comes after the location is established and only where the repair has to happen. Anybody who arrives and starts by breaking concrete has skipped the part you were paying for.
Yes, and it is worth establishing before you spend anything. The meter is the boundary. An isolation test at the meter separates the two: shut the property side and watch whether the meter still moves. If it does, the loss is before your connection and it belongs to eThekwini, and you report it rather than repair it. If it stops, it is yours. Getting that the wrong way round is how people pay to repair something that was never theirs.
It can be, and a slow one is worth taking more seriously than a fast one in some ways. A pinhole weeping into a cavity or under a screed can run for months without changing the pressure at a tap, because the volume is small relative to the supply. What it does instead is soak structure, lift tiles and feed mould. The tracing for these uses moisture readings and thermal difference rather than sound, since there is often not enough flow to hear.
It can cut both ways, which is why the paperwork matters. Many policies cover sudden escape of water and the damage it causes, but exclude gradual seepage that a reasonable owner should have noticed, and they will ask when it started and what you did about it. A dated trace report that locates the leak and an itemised invoice for the repair are what turn your account of events into evidence. Ask for both in writing, whoever does the work.
Get In Touch
Think you have a leak in Durban? Tell us what the meter is doing and we will tell you what a trace on your property involves and what it costs.