How to Find a Reticulation Leak (and When to Call)

If your water bill has jumped, a patch of lawn stays soggy, or water appears where no sprinkler reaches, your retic may be leaking. Some leaks you can find yourself in ten minutes. Others hide under paving, turf or a driveway, and that is where a technician earns the visit.

Rather leave it to us? Call us on (08) 6263 4644. Repairs are booked, not quoted, and most faults are fixed in the same visit.

1. Check the water meter with everything off

Turn the retic controller off, and make sure no taps, hoses or appliances are running in the house. Note the meter reading, or watch its small dial. Then check it again after a while without using any water. If it has moved, water is escaping somewhere.

On one Scarborough job the meter was still slowly turning with everything switched off. The cause was a station valve sticking open, and the master valve was replaced. A valve that isn't sealing is a common reason for a creeping meter, and it is worth fixing quickly because it runs up your water bill.

2. Run one station at a time and walk it

Use the controller's manual setting to run each station in turn, and walk it while it runs. Look for:

• Water bubbling up at a head or out of the ground.
• A sprinkler that barely rises, because the water is escaping before it gets there.
• One spot that floods while the rest of the station waters normally.

A leak on one station robs the rest of that station of pressure. Our guide to sprinklers not popping up and low pressure explains what each sign points to.

3. Look where leaks hide

• Under artificial turf and paving. A Balcatta job reported as "flooding near the bins" was a riser snapped off under artificial turf, invisible from the surface.
• Beside driveways. Pipe along a slab edge takes more load than pipe in open garden, because the edge is where wheels track when someone parks slightly wide. A Melville leak was right there, beside the driveway.
• At old brass fittings. On an older Inglewood system the leak was a very old brass pipe and joiner. Brass of that age corrodes from the inside, so a fitting can look sound while its wall has worn thin.
• At the valves themselves. A Melville lawn with a big wet patch looked like a burst pipe. It was a master valve and a station solenoid that had both failed and were leaking together.

4. Don't dig blind

Digging up a lawn or lifting paving on a guess can cost more than the repair. On a repair visit we trace the leak and dig only where needed. After the fix, the line gets flushed: on that Balcatta job, debris that got in through the break had travelled down the line and blocked the last sprinkler, so that head was replaced too.

Sometimes the right answer is not to repair it

In Duncraig, one minor leak sat in a small garden bed under a very large tree, and reaching the pipe would have meant removing the tree. We reported the trade-off plainly and left the call to the owner, rather than presenting removal as a necessary repair.

What a repair visit costs

Repairs are booked, not quoted: a $160 call-out fee, then labour at $40 per 15 minutes on site, plus any parts. The full breakdown is in our reticulation cost guide.