Insights · 6 min read
Microleakages — the silent enemy behind the wall
Not every water incident starts with a bang. The most expensive damage often develops over months — as tiny drips from a joint, a toilet cistern or a safety valve. A microleakage stays below the radar of ordinary water meters and still causes serious damage to your building fabric and your water bill. This article explains where they originate and how they can be reliably detected.
What is a microleakage?
A microleakage in a drinking-water system is a very small — and often long-unnoticed — escape of water from pipes, fittings or joints. Unlike a classic pipe burst, which releases large amounts of water in seconds, a microleakage typically flows at only a few drops or millilitres per hour.
Typical flow rates sit below 10 litres per day — sometimes so low that ordinary water meters do not even register them, because the flow is below their starting threshold.
Where do microleakages usually occur?
Microleakages are especially common at points that are mechanically stressed or ageing:
- Leaky toilet cisterns — the typical, barely visible trickle running down into the bowl.
- Dripping faucets or valves — often caused by hard water and brittle seals.
- Faulty press-fittings or solder joints — hairline cracks in pipe connections inside the wall or under the floor.
- Failing safety valves — e.g. on the heating system or the hot-water tank, which quietly drip continuously.
Why are they so dangerous?
The insidious thing about microleakages is time. Because they don't get noticed, they can cause severe damage over months or years:
- Mould and structural damage — if water seeps continuously into a wall or screed, it inevitably leads to damp walls, mould growth, and in the worst case damage to load-bearing components.
- Cost — an unnoticed dripping cistern or safety valve can send several cubic metres of water down the drain per year — a noticeable line item on the water bill.
How are microleakages detected?
Visual inspection is impossible for pipes buried in walls, and mechanical water meters are too coarse. That's why modern building technology relies on electronic leak-protection systems. Installed directly downstream of the water meter, they use high-precision measurement methods:
- Pressure-drop test (static measurement) — the system automatically closes the main valve (usually at night, when no water is being used) and measures the line pressure. If pressure stays perfectly constant over a longer period, the system is watertight. If it drops, water is escaping somewhere — a microleakage.
- Ultrasonic flow measurement — modern sensors detect even the smallest flow velocities inside the pipe via ultrasound — well below the threshold of mechanical meters.
How Aqua-Scope detects microleakages
At Aqua-Scope, two sensor families handle microleakage detection: the Sonic Clamp with ultrasonic flow measurement on the pipe, and the Aqua-Scope Monitor Plus for consumption tracking with leak detection. Both measure flow so precisely that even movement in the range of a few millilitres per minute is picked up — far below the starting threshold of mechanical meters.
Two settings in the app decide when you actually get notified:
- Sensitivity — sets the measured amount at which the system flags a candidate event. A busy household with background flow (ice-maker refills, cistern top-ups) can run this looser than a holiday home, where every drip matters.
- Alarm threshold (default: 5) — the number of consecutive candidate events before a push alert is sent. Not every microleakage is worth investigating right away: a dripping tap or a slightly leaky cistern would ping you several times a day at a low threshold. For alerts to be worth acting on, they should only fire when they truly matter — and this setting is the dial between sensitivity and everyday usability.
Once confirmed, the system can — depending on configuration — not only alert you but also close the main valve via a Water Guard shut-off motor on the main valve, before the drip turns into damage.