I have looked at several entries on slab leaks. But a couple of questions remain. What does a leak detection firm charge - ball park only of course? I see that a listening device is used to locate the leak, can I replicate this myself? After they have found the leak - I will have to get through the slab to the leaky pipe. What is the best way for me to do that? I can't hire this done. I know that the leak is from the how water line, right now we turn off the hot water line after using what we need.
Thanks

The last time I checked, Sleuth charged 250$ to locate, cut the slab, bag the dirt and bare the leak for the plumber to repair. It could be more or less in your area. I don't know if you can build, or rent, your own listening device. We follow Sleuth in after they prepare the slab for us so I've never been on site when they did their work. Once the leak has been bared we cut out the bad piece and drain the system down. After we evacuate all the moisture out of the pipes so we can solder we take two couplings, one regular and the other a slip coupling, and solder in a new piece of pipe. We then fill the hole and float a cement patch over the hole and the job is finished. A little tip: You can not go by the warm spot on the slab as the leak may be feet away from the "hot spot". This is not a job for the average home owner as it requires considerable plumbing skills to solder a joint under these conditions. If there's even a pinhole leak the entire repair job must be cut out and the system drained down and the entire process repeated.
Regards, Tom

We recently had a similar problem, but we used trenchless pipe restoration. It is great - they use an epoxy pipeliner that repairs the inside of the pipe. It saved us a bunch of money.

The guys that helped were great - www.accurateleak.com - It is a cool technology.

Edith