I usually enjoy getting postcards. Pictures of tropical beaches, snow-capped mountains, historic landmarks. Recently, however, I received one I wasn’t expecting.
It was from the City Water Department.
Now that’s not exactly who you hope is thinking about you.
The postcard informed us that we had a water leak somewhere on our property...somewhere.
According to the notice, we were losing about a gallon of water every hour. A gallon an hour? That didn’t sound like much...Or was it? I had no clue, this has never happened to me before.
Naturally, my mind went straight to three questions:
Where is it? How long has it been leaking? And how much is this going to cost me?
The city said it might be from the toilet & suggested putting food coloring in the toilet tank, so I did, maybe it leaked, maybe it didn’t.
Let’s get real. I enjoy a nice hobby or two, but diagnosing toilets isn’t one of them.
Next, my son and I walked the entire property looking for a broken sprinkler head.
I was hoping for a $3 part, a two-minute repair, and a story with a happy ending.
No such luck.
Then someone said, “You need a leak detection specialist.”
A leak detection specialist? I didn’t even know that was a profession.
Apparently, there are people whose entire career revolves around finding water that doesn’t want to be found. The guy happened to attend my church, so I gave him a call.
He arrived, glanced at the water meter for about ten seconds, looked at me with a raised eyebrow and said, “Oh my goodness, the water company is wrong.”
For one glorious second I thought...“Fantastic! They made a mistake!”
Then he finished his sentence,. “You’re not losing a gallon an hour, you’re losing about 4½ gallons every minute.”
4 ½ GALLONS EVERY MINUTE!!!
My imagination immediately went into full Hollywood mode.
Was my kitchen about to become beachfront property?
Was the house going to be swallowed up by the earth?
Should I pull my family & the dog out the house and meet in the front yard?
I asked the guy, “So what do we do?” He smiled, “First, we find the leak.”
He opened the back of his truck and started suiting up.
Headphones, electronic sensors, a backpack full of gadgets & a long metal probe.
By the time he finished, he looked like he’d just stepped off the set of Ghostbusters.
Only instead of hunting ghosts, he was looking for something much scarier to me…a hidden money pit hiding somewhere beneath my house.
Less than fifteen minutes later, he stopped, marked a giant X on my garage floor, and calmly said, “It’s right here.”
No guessing. No digging random holes. No replacing things that weren’t broken.
Just an accurate diagnosis.
A few hours later the plumber opened the wall, rerouted the damaged pipe, turned the water back on and by the end of the day…problem solved.
That experience reminded me of something I see almost every day.
Finding the problem is often more important than treating the problem, because if you don’t know what’s actually wrong, you can become incredibly good at treating the wrong thing.
We could have replaced every toilet in our house, installed a brand-new sprinkler system, or replumbed half the house.
None of it would have fixed the broken pipe beneath the garage.
Pain is often the same way: People stretch the wrong muscles. Massage the wrong tissues. Inject the wrong joints. Take medications. Hope the problem goes away.
It’s like digging holes all over your yard while the real leak quietly keeps flowing underneath your garage.
Yesterday my last patient reminded me of that truth.
Earlier this year she survived a devastating head-on collision after an oncoming drivers trailer broke loose and struck her vehicle head on. The driver wasn’t insured.
Since then she’d undergone months of care, including chiropractic treatment, physical therapy, and two spinal surgeries. Yet she still had chronic pain rated at a 10/10.
After evaluating her and using diagnostic technology, I believed the primary pain generator was coming from a different location than had previously been emphasized.
After treating that area, she reported her pain had dropped from 10/10 to 1/10 during that visit. Will she need more care? Almost certainly, but it reinforced something.
The right treatment has a much better chance of succeeding when it’s applied to the right problem. The biggest lesson I learned wasn’t about plumbing, it was this...
Most people don’t have a treatment problem; they have a diagnosis problem.
By the way, my water bill finally arrived the other day & it was almost ten times what I normally pay but compared to the structural damage months of hidden leaking could have caused, it was actually a bargain.
Sometimes paying to fix the problem feels expensive but ignoring it is almost always far more expensive.
Oh, and by the way, I’m perfectly happy if the City Water Department never sends me another postcard, but if they do...I’m skipping the food coloring. This time, I already know who I’m gonna call.
Have a terrific Thursday!
Dr. Derek “Recovering Water Leak Survivor” Taylor
