Here we use a PoolScope by LeakTronics, to listen for a pipe leak outside the shell of a pool.

We take a line and put it under pressure with just water, and by listening in the pool, we can hear the leak in the pipe through the pool wall itself. The sensitivity if the PoolScope allows us to hear the leak, even through gunite.

We begin the leak detection by identifying all the areas of the pool we want to listen to, and we listen to them using the pool scope. In this situation, nothing definitive was being heard. We then opt to pressure test the line; we plug the return jets using Kane Plugs. As we have 5 return jets, we plug 4 with a solid plug, and one that has a hole drilled in the center. This allows us to use dye testing to see if the trunk line is taking in dye – which in this case, it was.

We then listen deeper inside the pipe using the PipeMic by LeakTronics. While the PipeMic does allow us to get further back into the line, we still weren’t able to find a definitive leak sound that would isolate the exact location of the leak.

Next, we plugged the line entirely, and injected water through the line to create the sound of the leak from inside the pipe. This non-invasive technique allows us to make the leak sound without cutting pipes and without destructive methods. Water is a great conductor of sound, and by using the PoolScope to listen through the pool wall, we were able to identify the exact location of the leak from the sound we created by pressurizing the line.

See the video below to see how we got the job done.