No Find, No Fee Leak Detection: Where the Promise Starts and Stops

The promise in plain words

No find, no fee waives the detection fee in one situation: we attend a confirmed live leak inside your own property and a live leak cannot be located. A leak that proves to be a neighbour's, a communal riser's or the water company's main is a located leak and is charged. A survey that establishes no leak exists is charged for the hours as well, because ruling a leak out is the answer you paid for. That is the whole policy, and it is deliberately narrow. A promise with no edges is one nobody can keep, and a leak search has edges: some leaks are not in your building, and some suspected leaks are not leaks.

The sentence that explains the rest is this one: you are paying for an answer, not for a leak. Sometimes the answer is that the water is yours and here is where. Sometimes it is that the water belongs to the flat upstairs. Sometimes it is that nothing is escaping at all. Each of those is worth having, and only one outcome leaves you with no answer, which is the case the policy covers.

Detection is charged by the hour at a rate quoted before anyone attends, and the rates are on the pricing page. The waiver removes the detection charge in the single case described above. It does not change how repairs are priced, and it does not make an ordinary visit unpaid.

The three outcomes side by side

Every leak visit ends in one of three places. The table puts them next to each other, and the sections after it take each in turn. If you only read one part of this page, read the table.

Outcome one: a live leak cannot be located

Three things must be true together for the detection fee to be waived. The leak must be confirmed live, which means there is evidence that water is escaping now. It must be inside your own property. And after a full search, the team must still be unable to say where it is.

The search is not a quick look. It runs through the methods the situation calls for: acoustic listening on the pipework, thermal imaging of walls and floors, moisture mapping, pressure testing of each circuit in turn, and where the pipe runs under a solid surface, tracer gas. Each method has limits, which is why several are combined. A pipe buried in a deep screed can defeat listening, and a cold, slow weep can defeat a thermal camera. Together they find most leaks, and the policy exists for the few they do not.

Here is how it plays out. A terraced house has a water meter that turns steadily with every tap and appliance off, so the leak is confirmed live. The team tests the supply, then each heating circuit, listens along the visible runs and maps the ground floor. Tracer gas is considered and used where the evidence points. After the search, the leak is still unaccounted for. The detection fee is waived, and you leave with a written note of what was tested and what was ruled out, which is useful for whatever comes next. If tracer gas was used, the cylinder is the one item that was consumed, and the engineer will have told you about it before the gas went in. No VAT is charged.

• The leak is confirmed live, with evidence that water is escaping now.
• The leak is inside your own property.
• A full search has been carried out and the leak still cannot be located.
• Only then is the detection fee waived.

What counts as a confirmed live leak

Confirmed live is a deliberately practical test. It does not rest on a hunch, however strong. It rests on something that can be seen, measured or repeated, and the team will usually establish it in the first part of the visit if you have not already.

The common evidence is a water meter that moves when everything is off, a sealed heating system that keeps losing pressure and needs topping up, a stain that grows between two photographs, or a damp patch that is measurably wetter than it was. The leak photo checklist shows what is worth recording before the visit, and it is also the kind of record that makes a live leak easy to confirm.

What does not confirm a leak on its own is a high bill, a smell of damp or a feeling that something is wrong. Those are good reasons to book a survey. They are not evidence that water is escaping, and a survey that cannot find evidence of an escape is describing outcome three, not outcome one.

Outcome two: the leak is found but it is not yours

Sometimes the search ends with a clear answer, and the answer is in someone else’s pipe. The water on your kitchen ceiling is coming from the bathroom of the flat above. The wet patch on your hall floor is a communal riser that serves the whole block. The loss on your meter is a supply pipe that has failed on the water company’s side of the boundary.

In each of these the leak has been located, and that is why the hours are charged. The work was done and you now hold something concrete: where it is, how it was confirmed and who is responsible for it. A neighbour’s leak, a communal riser’s leak and the water company’s main are all located leaks, and they are charged like any other.

This outcome is also where a written record matters most. A clear account of what was found and how lets you raise the problem with the right party without arguing about whether a leak exists. Landlords, managing agents and neighbours respond to a documented finding in a way they do not respond to a stain. The cost side of who pays for what is covered elsewhere on this site, and the rule here is simply that a located leak is a charged survey.

Outcome three: no leak exists

A person can be certain they have a leak and be mistaken. Condensation on a cold pipe looks like a drip. A damp wall may be a failed window seal or a bathroom with poor ventilation. A heating system can lose pressure through a relief valve or an expansion vessel without any pipe leaking. A meter can creep because a toilet cistern refills slowly. In all of these, the survey rules the leak out circuit by circuit, and the answer is that no leak exists.

That is a result, and it is charged for the hours, because ruling a leak out is exactly what you asked for. Someone who has lain awake worrying about water behind the bath now knows, with readings behind it, that there is none, and can look at the real cause. It often stops a person paying for a repair that was never needed.

Here is a scenario. A flat owner sees a patch of damp on a chimney breast and fears a hidden pipe. The survey checks the supply, the heating circuit that runs nearby and the waste pipework, maps the moisture and finds it concentrated at the outer wall rather than around any pipe. The pipes hold pressure and show no escape. The finding is that no leak exists and that the damp has another source. The hours are charged at the rate quoted. The typical figure for a one to two room survey, for scale, is £320, a worked example of rate multiplied by 2 hours. No VAT is charged.

Flats, shared pipework and where your property ends

Flats make the boundary question practical. Inside your own front door, the pipes that serve only your flat are your own property for this purpose: the branches to your taps, your bath, your radiators and your appliances. The risers, shared supply pipes, communal heating mains and the structure between flats are not.

The team searches shared pipework and party walls when a leak points that way, with the access that the building allows. What changes is the outcome. If the water proves to come from the riser or from the flat above, the leak has been located and the survey is charged. If it proves to be your own pipe, the outcome depends on whether it was found.

A useful habit is to say at booking that you live in a flat and whether you know of any shared pipework nearby. It does not change the rate. It helps the engineer start in the right place, and it helps both of you recognise early when a search is heading toward outcome two. The pricing page sets out the rates that apply to the search itself.

Why the line is drawn here

It would be easy to promise that you never pay when a search ends without a result. It would also be misleading, and it would push the price of every other visit up. Two honest reasons explain the edges.

The first is that a located leak is a result. If the survey proves the source is the neighbour’s pipe, you have spent hours of skilled time to learn something you can act on, and that has the same value to you as finding your own leak. The second is that a survey which establishes that nothing is escaping has also done its job. Waiving the fee there would reward the wrong thing: it would make a search pointless to run to its end and it would invite requests that cannot be answered.

What is left is a promise you can rely on because it is clear. If a confirmed live leak in your own property cannot be located, the detection fee is waived. Everything else is a diagnosis, and a diagnosis takes time.

What you can expect in writing

Whatever the outcome, you should end the visit with a record that matches it. For a located leak, that is where the leak is, how it was confirmed and what it will take to deal with, quoted in writing if the repair is longer than a small fix. For a leak that cannot be located, it is the list of what was tested and what was ruled out. For no leak, it is the same list, with the readings that show the systems hold.

The evidence that sits behind those notes includes meter readings, pressure test results, thermal and moisture images and the engineer’s account of each method used. Ask for them to be included. A record you can show to a landlord, a managing agent or an insurer is part of the value of the visit, and the written report is inside the hours rather than an extra charge.

• Readings: meter readings and pressure tests, with the circuit each one covers.
• Images: thermal and moisture images, with where each was taken.
• Methods: what was used, in what order and what each one showed.
• Outcome: located, not located or ruled out, in one plain sentence.
• Next step: a small fix done on the spot, a written quote for a longer repair, or no repair needed.