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- Refurbished hotel: a failed fitting under the garden bank
A refurbished hotel, a boosted supply that would not hold, and the leak under the garden bank
Weeks from reopening, the hotel's boosted supply to two garden taps lost pressure the moment the pump stopped. We traced it to a failed 25 mm fitting under a garden bank, replaced it and retested.
What was happening
The hotel had been newly renovated and was in the final stages of refurbishment. The pipework feeding two external taps, an estimated 80 to 100 metres of blue plastic (MDPE) pipe fed by a 4 bar booster set with its own break tank, was losing pressure. There was no practical way to measure how much water was escaping. When the booster pump was switched off the pressure dropped straight away, which points to a significant leak.
What the engineer did
Acoustic listening came first and gave nothing conclusive. Tracer gas was then introduced through an outside tap and picked up on a bank in the lower gardens, towards the car park. With water and gas both on, a second acoustic pass narrowed the area to roughly a square metre, and a trace wire located the pipe and a fitting on it.
What was found
With the hotel's permission the bank was excavated. The pipe was found, but the leak was a little further along, so a second excavation was needed. The fault was a 25 mm tee (a T-shaped fitting) where a capped-off branch had failed.
What happened next
ADI replaced the failed fitting, pressure tested the repair and backfilled both excavations.
If you run a hotel
A boosted supply hides its losses: the pump keeps topping up the pressure, so nothing looks wrong until the pump stops. If your booster set runs more than it used to, that is worth a call before the grounds show it.
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A detached hotel was losing an estimated 17 litres of water an hour. With the stopcock closed the meter stopped, so the loss was inside. A room-by-room inspection found the causes.