Slab leak water damage cleanup in Los Angeles

A hot spot on the floor means a hot water line is leaking inside the slab, warming the concrete from below. You feel it barefoot on tile or see it in a pet lying on the same spot. A thermal camera shows the warm patch clearly. We map how far the moisture has traveled beyond the warm spot, which is usually much further, and mark the floor so the plumber knows where to access the line and we know how much flooring has to come up.

Buckled flooring over a slab is laminate, engineered wood or vinyl plank lifting because water from below swelled the boards or the underlayment. Floating floors lift and separate at the joints first. We remove the affected flooring and underlayment so the slab can breathe, because concrete covered by flooring can stay wet for weeks. Readings across the slab tell us where to stop removing, so sound flooring beyond the wet edge stays down. Baseboards along the wet edge come off too.

Wet carpet with no visible source, often in a room with no plumbing at all, is a classic slab leak sign. Water travels under the carpet pad along the slab until it shows up somewhere unexpected. We pull the carpet back, read the slab across the room to find the wettest point, and trace it toward the nearest water line. The pad comes out, the slab dries, and the carpet is relaid once the line is fixed and the slab reads dry at every point we marked.