By David Dickman

I should have known better.

After all of these years writing about leak detection, I should have recognized the warning signs and done something about it.

But I didn’t — and it cost me. It started in June, when my wife complained to me about a wet spot in the flower bed on the east side of our pool deck. The flowers she had planted there were dying from what appeared to be overwatering. But it was really no big deal, I said. She dug out the dead plants, put in new ones, and adjusted the drip irrigation system to water a bit less.

Then I noticed some standing water at the curb in front of our house. It wouldn’t dry up. It appeared to be fed from the deck drains in the back yard. But it was no big deal, so I ignored it.

Then, toward the end of the month, I got a notice from the City of San Clemente Utilities Department. “Dear Water Customer,” it stated, “Water consumption at the above referenced address is significantly higher this month when compared to the previous month. You used 5 units of water last month and this month you used 23 units (1 unit = 748 gallons). The meter was re-read two times and confirmed by our field crew for accuracy.”

The letter went on to offer suggestions for what I might do to track down possible leaks around the house.

I was a little alarmed, but water’s cheap — right? I’ll just wait for the water bill to arrive and see what this little nuisance is going to cost me.

A few days later, the bill did come, and it was a bit of a sticker shock. Instead of the usual charge of around $85 for water and sewer service, my bill had more than doubled to $176.90!

“OK,” I said to myself, “I’ve really got to get this taken care of. I should call someone — maybe next week.”

Then, on a peaceful Saturday morning in early July, there was a knock on our door. It was one of our neighbors, who had observed what he believed to be an alarming amount of water flowing out of the curbside drain and into the street.

“Yes,” I told him, “I’ve been meaning to take care of that.” I casually glanced into the street — and all of a sudden, panic began to set in. If anything, my neighbor had understated what was happening. It was a serious flood. Gallons and gallons of water were flowing into the street. It was as if someone had opened a fire hydrant.

I ran into the back yard and discovered a geyser shooting water a foot up through the pool deck. The pool was filled to overflowing. The deck and surrounding flower beds were flooded. I didn’t know for how many hours this condition had existed, but I knew that I was in the middle of a full-on water emergency.

I raced to the front of the house and shut off the water main. But now I was stuck. What do I do? Who do I call? Finding the leak wasn’t going to be too hard, but who did I know who could pull off the repair?

As luck would have it, I knew a guy. Alan Smith had overseen a major renovation on the pool a few years ago, and I still had his direct number in my cell phone’s list of contacts. I figured that if his firm couldn’t do the repair, he could at least refer me to someone who could. Still in panic mode, I gave him a call.

Alan is an interesting guy. He started out as a pool plasterer in 1981, specializing in replaster jobs, tile and coping. And over four decades, Alan Smith Pools, headquartered in Orange, California, expanded to include complete pool renovations, new construction, and — welcome news to me — leak detection and repair.

Alan is now paring back his involvement in his pool company while pursuing a new venture with Oxium Water Technology of Sarasota, Florida, which produces a pool plaster preservation and restoration system called MicroGlass.

He told me that leak repair was a part of his business from the very beginning. Early on, he found that almost every pool renovation job involved finding and fixing leaks. And rather than waiting to discover a leak after plaster had been poured or decking had been laid, a much more practical solution was to solve leak problems before any major work was begun.

Leak detection and repair had become so lucrative a sideline to his main business that four years ago, he started a separate company — H2O Leak Pros — to handle that specialized task.

To head the new company, Alan hired Rick Specht, whose background was very similar to his own.

Since the 1980s, Rick had been operating a company in Oregon, specializing in pool remodeling and renovation. And, like Alan, he discovered early on that leak detection was “joined at the hip” to his work. Disappointed with the work of other leak-detection firms in his area, Rick started another division within his company to do the job right.

Rick sold his company and moved to Southern California for family reasons and was considering retirement when he and Alan got together. Today, H2O Leak Pros maintains three full-time crews.

One of those crews showed up at our house the Monday following the emergency. Finding the leak was not a problem. The shooting fountain of water in the backyard gave a pretty accurate indication of where it was located.

The source of the fountain turned out to be a broken fitting in an irrigation line. The repair itself took a little more than an hour from start to finish. It involved removing the bricks that made up that section of the deck, digging down to expose the break, cutting out the broken section, patching in a new piece of pipe, and testing the repair to see if any other problems were present.

The cost of the repair itself was negligible compared to the water bill I received at the end of the month. Remember how shocked I was to get a $176.90 bill for 23 units of water? My July bill was for 70 units, and it ran $417.07!

And money aside, I calculated how much precious water I had wasted over a two-month period and realized that it amounted to more than 62,000 gallons! I was truly ashamed.

But as miserable as the episode was, it did give me a chance to talk to Alan Smith and Rick Specht about the science — and art — of leak detection.

Both men told me that before they would even start a pool remodel, they would do a thorough leak assessment.

Often, Rick told me, a customer shopping for a pool renovation would fail to mention that the pool had a leak problem. It didn’t take him long to realize that finding and repairing leaks before any major work starts saves time, money, and headaches.

His leak assessment starts with a visual inspection of the equipment pad. This is followed by a pressure test of the plumbing lines and a dive into the pool to dye test the underwater surface, skimmer, light niche, main drain and returns.

Obviously, the toughest challenge is to locate plumbing leaks that are underground. That is where the company would employ the more sophisticated weapons in its leaklocating arsenal, using hydrophones and sonar sensors to pinpoint what could be miniscule leaks in plumbing lines.

Rick told me that one of his disappointments with some leak locating firms was that once they discovered a leak, they would stop looking, even though multiple leaks might be present.

He said that one of his most valuable tools is the Leakalyzer — a sophisticated, computer-aided device that can sense the presence of a leak even if one is not readily apparent.

Using local environmental conditions such as humidity and wind, the Leakalyzer compares the water loss in a swimming pool to what would be expected through normal evaporation. “It’s just like a bucket test,” he said, “only it can give you results in 15 minutes instead of 24 hours.”

A float attached to the Leakalyzer is lowered to the pool’s surface, where it measures the water level at 1/100-ofa- second intervals to obtain the tiny changes that can occur over a few minutes. The computer then compares that to the expected loss and plots the difference — if there is any — on a graph.

Rick says that it took him two years and thousands of pools before he could truly master the Leakalyzer and accurately interpret its results. “It’s a scientific instrument,” he said, “but there’s really an art to using it.”

Both Alan Smith and Rick Specht agreed that accurate, thorough leak detection and repair are essential to providing customers with peace of mind and that by standing 100-percent behind the work they do, they are preserving an all-important culture of customer service.