The line between your meter and your house carries every drop you use, and when it fails the first clue is usually outside. San Antonio 24 Hour Plumber proves where the loss is happening before anyone digs a trench across your yard.
Indoor leaks announce themselves. A yard line can run for months without anyone noticing, because the water simply soaks away underground. The pattern to watch for is pressure that fell everywhere rather than at one sink, since a single weak fixture is almost always an aerator or a valve instead.
A buried line is the one part of your plumbing nobody can see, so the work starts with measurement rather than a shovel. San Antonio 24 Hour Plumber confirms the loss, finds it, then shows you the routes available.
An isolation test at the meter separates the buried supply from everything inside the walls. That single step decides whether you are looking at a yard repair, an irrigation fault or a leak under the house, and each of those is a different job.
Pressure testing and acoustic tracing follow the pipe from the meter box to the point it enters the house. Marking the break to a spot instead of a general area is what keeps the excavation to a small opening rather than a trench down the whole yard.
A clean break in otherwise sound pipe can be cut out and rejoined. A line that has failed once because of its age or material usually deserves replacing end to end, either by open trench or by pulling new pipe along the old path. You see both quotes.
Ownership is worth understanding before the first quote. The water utility owns the main under the street and, in most cases, the meter itself. The pipe running from that meter box to your house is the property owner's responsibility, and it is nearly always the part that fails. That is also why a leak in your yard rarely gets fixed by reporting it to the utility. The main shutoff for most homes around San Antonio sits in that same meter box at the curb, under a rectangular lid, and knowing where yours is turns a flooded yard into a manageable problem.
Why these lines fail here comes down to soil and age. Expansive clay across the eastern and northern suburbs swells after rain and shrinks hard through a dry summer, and a buried line gets pulled at every joint as the ground moves under it. Farther north the trench is cut into shallow limestone, where a pipe resting against rock wears at one point instead. Add older galvanized or polybutylene supply lines in houses built before the mid-1990s, and the pattern is consistent: the failure is in the pipe material, not in anything you did.
The two realistic routes are an open-cut repair and a replacement that pulls new pipe along the existing path with only an entry and exit pit. Trenchless work is not always possible, since driveways, mature tree roots, rock and the depth of the line all affect it, but it is the right question to ask when the line crosses a lawn you care about. Ask which one is being quoted, how the yard will be left, and whether the new line will be pressure tested and flushed before it is buried.
If the water is showing up inside instead, slab leak repair covers lines under the concrete, and burst pipe repair covers a split you can actually reach. Not sure which one you have? Start with leak detection, or browse every option on the plumbing services page.
Water line work covers San Antonio and the surrounding communities, including New Braunfels, where new subdivisions and century-old streets sit side by side. See the full service area list or tell us what you are seeing in the yard.
Length, depth and what sits on top of the line. Repairing one break in an open lawn is a small job; replacing a run that passes under a driveway, a patio or mature landscaping is not. The pipe material and whether the property can be served by a trenchless pull also matter. San Antonio 24 Hour Plumber quotes the repair and the replacement side by side once the line has been located, so you are comparing real numbers rather than guesses.
Usually not. The utility maintains the main in the street and the meter; the line from the meter to the house belongs with the property. If water is bubbling up on the street side of the meter box, that is worth reporting to your provider first. If the wet ground is on your side of the box, it is yours to repair, and San Antonio 24 Hour Plumber can confirm which side of that line the leak sits on.
Often, yes. Pulling a new line along the existing path needs only a pit at each end, which leaves the lawn between them largely untouched. Rock, driveways, shallow depth and heavy root systems can rule it out, so it is confirmed at the property rather than promised over the phone. Ask for both options in writing before you approve anything.
If the yard is flooding or water is running across a sidewalk or driveway, yes. Turn the valve in the meter box at the curb, or the shutoff where the line enters the house if you have one. Keep away from any spot where the water is pooling near electrical equipment or a panel. If pressure is merely low and nothing is pooling, it is fine to leave the water on until a plumber can test it. Our service process page explains what happens next.
Tell us what you have noticed and we will plan the right visit.