How to repair a leaking water supply line

Posted by John Smith on October 14th, 2019

Now that you’ve located the site of the water leak repair, and it’s not a water main but a pipe on the meter side of your house, so your responsibility. A DIY option would be to dig a trench around the leak, repair the pipe, with an copper pipe repair clam reinstate the trench and patch the damage to your landscape. While fairly straightforward, it certainly won’t be clean or easy work.

• Plan ahead: If this is the main supply line to your house, you’ll have to keep your water turned off while repairs are underway. You can install your SD clamp under pressure if you can’t shut off the supply. Many valves become stuck in the open position.
• Check out the current building codes regarding underground plumbing.
• Buried utility lines: Call 811 and have the utility companies come out and mark the location of any underground gas lines, electrical wires, and other buried cables before you start digging!
• Prepare for the worst: The pipe may be deteriorated in more than one place and require more than one clamp from your kit SD kit.
• Digging: Make the trench large enough to access at least a foot of pipe on each side of the leak and a 6” underneath it. You don’t need much room to install your SD clamp as it’s can be opened up and wrapped around the pipe. Work carefully and slowly, making sure you don’t make the problem worse by hitting the pipe with a shovel.
• Once you’ve uncovered the pipe, if you don’t know the outside diameter of the pipe you can measure the outside diameter and determine the type (PVC, copper, steel, etc.). A great piece of kit for the toolbox is an o.d tape which measures the outside diameter of a pipe exactly. If not then.
• Wrap a string around the pipe.
• Mark the point where the string touches together.
• Use a ruler or measuring tape to find the length between the tip of the string and the mark you made (circumference)

Divide the circumference by 3.14159.

All Superior Direct pvc pipe repair kits have 5 different sizes that cover most types of pipe in your home. Select the correct size wrap it around the pipe beside the leak and then simply slide it over the leak, tighten the nut and hey presto the leak is stopped permanently. This is is the same type of clamp your local utility company uses and is built to last for many years.
 
Careful preparation and the proper tools, can make the difference between water leak repair and a plumbing nightmare, but even the best planned jobs can hit snags, so give yourself plenty of time.