Detecting A Water Leak Early Could Save You Thousands of Dollars

There are a lot of things that can cause water damage to your home. Extremely cold temperatures that cause pipes to burst. A failing water heater that explodes. A game of indoor tackle football that gets slightly out of hand.

However, most of the time, water damage comes from a small leak that turns into a disaster. In fact, water damage is one of the more commonly reported home insurance claims in the U.S., costing an average of about $9,000 per incident.

Those costs go beyond simply repairing the leak and any damage it might cause to the surrounding area. They can also include:

• Mold and mildew cleanup
• Healthcare costs from mold and mildew
• Replacing lost items
• Damage to the property of others

While there’s not much you can do in terms of stopping the leak from ever happening, there is something you can do about it becoming a major problem, and it’s called a water sensor.

Detecting Leaks Before They Become Disasters

Unless you feel like going around your home every day, examining pipes and poking drywall with your fingers, it’s a lot easier to grab a water sensor or two and place them around your home.

They’re also a lot cheaper than $9,000.

Water sensors help you detect leaks by working around the clock and alerting you when there’s a problem (for example, that moment in time your water heater has decided to let itself go.) Ours works with your Wi-Fi and will send you a notification to your app, sound a siren, and even alert you to leaks through a voice assistant, like your Google Hub.

Basically, it’d be nearly impossible for you not to notice it.

On top of that, you can also use a Wi-Fi water sensor to:

• Monitor a problem area where you suspect there’s a leak
• Keep an eye on an area you’ve recently repaired
• Check up on a place where you recently installed new pipes, a dishwasher, water heater, etc.
• Know the exact moment you need to stop chopping onions and leave the kitchen*

*This has not been tested

How They Work

In order to detect a leak, the sensor contains two metal strips that can be triggered when an electrical current is conducted between them. In this case, the water acts as the conductor.

It doesn’t take much to trigger it either. In most cases, a drop or two is enough for it to alert you there’s a leak in your home—or that your moments away from a new slip-n’-slide in the hallway.

With ours, once you repair the leak and the sensor dries, you can run a check using your phone—or your voice—to check on the leak. For those of you with a Google Hub, it will actually notify you that the leak is no longer detected.

What About the Power?

Some water sensors are powered by an AC adapter, which comes with limitations. First, they won’t work when the power goes out. Secondly, they can be hard to place where you need them if you don’t have an outlet nearby.

The simple workaround to this is a battery-powered water sensor. You can place it anywhere you need it—provided it has Wi-Fi signal. And, if the Wi-Fi goes out with the power, the siren will still go off.

Yes, you will have to replace the batteries when they die, but, because they don’t use much electricity, the water sensor could last up to a year and a half before that happens. And, when the batteries begin to run low, you’ll get an alert on your app.

Basically, what we’re trying to say is that there’s no need for a leak to go undetected in your home and become a flood that wipes out your bank account and everything in your basement.