𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗸 𝘄𝗲 𝗸𝗻𝗲𝘄 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘄𝗲𝗲𝗸𝘀 Savannah. We had a water leak, and we knew it because we'd been reading the master meter at 2 am when few are up to flush a toilet. The number wouldn't slow down. Knowing was the easy part. Finding it took weeks. It rained for days, and you can't walk a property for a leak in the rain. Everything is wet, and the ground tells you nothing. So we waited for a dry stretch, then walked the buildings over and over, looking for the one place that shouldn't be damp. We found a soft spot. Barely wet, dry ground all around it. Dug it up. The line was buried shallow enough that a shovel would have found it eventually. We got lucky. The wet spot isn't always over the break. Water can surface in surprising places, not always just above the leak. If you're staring at a water bill that keeps climbing, this is the order I'd work it. Read the master meter at 2am, three nights running. One night is an anecdote. You'll rarely hit zero on an occupied property, so build a floor. Anything above it is going into the dirt. One gallon a minute is 43,000 gallons a month, call it $500 at the rates I've seen. Shut the irrigation off and read again. Then run each zone and watch the meter, because a break past the zone valve sits unpressurized overnight. Still leaking? Close building isolation valves one at a time, if you have them. Every valve cuts the search area in half. Then call the plumber. That's the point of doing the first three yourself. You're not paying his hourly rate to wander the property guessing. Trip charges and hunt time on a big site add up quick. Pothole the wet spot with a hand shovel. But before a machine touches the ground, call the dig line. Most states only require it for mechanized work; it's free, and hitting a gas line is a bad day. Before the hole gets backfilled, lay tracer wire if the line is plastic, and take a photo with your location on so the break gets a GPS coordinate instead of living in somebody's memory until they quit. Keep those points on a map. Where there's one break, there's more, and they come off the same line. Three on the same run and you're not repairing anymore, you're renting the problem. File for the leak adjustment early. Most utilities credit the portion that never reached the sewer, but the cap is usually two bills and the clock runs from the high bill. The ones that worry me are under the slabs. No soft spot to walk to. No wet grass. Just a bill that's wrong and a foundation you can't see through.