Home/Services/Leak Detection/Bathrooms & Wet Areas
Bathroom & Wet Area Leak Detection
Is it the waterproofing or is it the plumbing? Those two answers lead to completely different repairs, different trades and — in strata — different people paying. We establish which, without taking the bathroom apart.
The first question is not where. It is what.
A damp patch on a bathroom wall, an adjacent hallway, or the ceiling below has two broad explanations, and they behave differently.
A plumbing leak runs continuously. Supply lines are pressurised around the clock, so a failure there produces damp that never dries out, regardless of whether the shower has been used.
A waterproofing failure is intermittent. It only admits water when the area is wet, so the moisture rises after use and recedes between times — often in a daily rhythm that tracks the household.
That single distinction is the most useful thing a survey establishes, and it is why timed moisture readings are worth more than one visit with a meter.
Where wet areas actually fail
- The shower floor waste and puddle flange — the membrane must bond to the waste body. Where it does not, water tracks straight into the slab at the penetration.
- The hob or step-down at the shower entry — a common termination point, and a common place for the membrane to stop short.
- Wall-to-floor junctions — movement between two planes, handled by a bond breaker and a flexible sealant that has a service life.
- Tap and mixer penetrations — every hole through a wall membrane is a point of entry.
- Grout and silicone — deteriorated grout lets water into the bed constantly. Perished silicone at the screen or hob does the same. Neither is waterproofing, but both keep water off it.
- The membrane itself — under-applied, applied to a contaminated substrate, or not carried high enough up the walls. Not visible without removing tiles, but measurable through them.
- Falls to waste — a floor that ponds keeps water standing on the membrane instead of draining it away, and turns a marginal detail into a leak.
How we test it without demolition
Measure at depth, not at the surface
- Thermography detects thermal abnormalities that indicate moisture
- Microwave moisture mapping reads through tile bed, screed and slab
- Distinguishes surface damp from a saturated substrate
Isolate one element at a time
- Waste sealed and the floor flooded — tests the floor membrane alone
- Shower run with the waste open — tests the walls and screen
- Taps isolated at the stop valve — separates supply from fabric
- Readings repeated over time, not taken once
Rule the plumbing in or out
- Supply lines pressure tested
- Waste lines camera inspected where warranted
- Acoustic listening on concealed pressurised lines
- A finding a plumber can act on, or eliminate
Ceiling below a wet area. A clean white ceiling to the eye. The thermogram resolves a defined cool plume with a clear shape and edge — the extent of the moisture, not the extent of the staining.
Why it matters more in a unit than a house
In a house, a bathroom leak is a repair. In a strata building it is also a question of responsibility — the waterproofing membrane and the structural slab are commonly part of common property, while finishes inside the lot are more often the owner's, and the boundary is set by the registered plan and the applicable regulation module rather than by common sense.
We do not interpret that boundary for you; your body corporate manager or a strata lawyer does. What we provide is the fact everything else turns on — what is leaking, and from where — documented well enough to survive disagreement.
Rectification under our own licence
Highpoint Solutions holds a QBCC waterproofing licence (Cert III CPC31411). Where the finding is a waterproofing failure, the same crew can strip, prepare and re-waterproof the area to current standards — including the details that were missed the first time, which is usually why it failed.