The biggest lesson to learn here is to never put off your home repair for too long or even to make the decisions. We “just” (this is relatively speaking) found out that we had a leak under our slab. We did not notice it at first but the kids really liked playing around on the area in the winter, apparently because the floor was warm. Never had this experience before, we thought that this was quite normal since the floor was close to the water heater.
Fast forward a few months, we had a small leak in our front yard that was fixed by a plumber. When he checked the main meter, even after everything in the house was shut down, the meter was still running albeit slowly. He couldn’t figure out what else was still on. Only by that time, I connected the dots that the water heater was not shut off and after we did it, the meter finally stopped running. So it was confirmed there was a leak from the water heater and that was the cause of the warm floor in the kitchen. The question now is how can we fix it?
I can’t imagine if we have to jackhammer the kitchen floor to fix the leaking pipe. This is just logistically unimaginable right now with young kids in the house. Besides, I couldn’t imagine how much the slab leak repair cost is going to be. So we consulted with our plumber and a couple more people and decided the best way to do this is just to repipe the whole house and rerouting plumbing lines in slab foundation to the attic with PEX A.
Getting quotes is a chore. Plumbing companies are extremely busy and it was quite difficult to find an immediate time slot. Our inexperience, added by the time-consuming process to get quotes from competing contractors could potentially make the problem worse.
After just signing a contract with one company we like, now I just noticed another problem, buckled floor. What’s curious here is the affected area is a bit farther from the warm tile floor and that area never feels warm at all. We didn’t feel anything wet, which is a good thing. No water seeping through slab foundation, but that doesn’t mean anything until we have it checked. So I’m not sure to what extent the damage is on the slab. The plumber suggested to have another appointment for a slab leak detection and repair. But slab leak detection cost is around $300 now and if we decided to reroute the plumbing, I don’t think it’s cost effective to get someone just to tell me about a problem I already know. So I’m going to skip the slab leak detection for now.
The only saving grace right now is we know that the leak is from the water heater so we have either try to minimize its use (shut off and on) or totally turn it off for the next two some weeks until we’re done with the repiping. We just hope that the concrete damage is not so extensive that we need to repair it right away. This repipe can’t come sooner.
