The town centre flats are the urgent ones. A leak in a first floor apartment above a commercial unit does not stay in the flat — it goes into the shop below, and now there is stock, a business, an insurer and a freeholder involved. Speed matters, but accuracy matters more, because opening the wrong ceiling to look is itself a claim. We trace first: thermal imaging through the floor, acoustic on the mains, and a mark on the floor before anything gets lifted.
In the terraces it is usually the slow one — a weep on a heating pipe under a floor that has been quietly going for months, showing up only as a boiler that keeps losing pressure. Every top-up brings oxygen into a sealed system and the system corrodes from the inside. People assume topping up is maintenance. It is a symptom.
In the bigger houses out towards the Bowdon side, the classic is a leak under a solid floor in an extension — a heating pipe in a screed, no access, and a homeowner being told the floor has to come up. Usually it does not. Thermal imaging reads warm pipes through screed clearly enough that we can lift a metre of it rather than the room.
One local factor across all of it: soft water. Around 30 mg/l means no scale, which is good for your boiler and bad for your old copper — there is no internal scale layer protecting the pipe wall. On pre-war Altrincham stock, pinholing in old copper and lead on the incoming main are both worth checking, and both take minutes to look at.
