Appliance leaks
Appliance & Supply Line Leaks
A washing machine hose, a dishwasher, a water heater or a fridge line. Small, unglamorous, and collectively the most common loss in an occupied house.
There are two kinds of appliance failure and they produce completely different jobs. One announces itself. The other does not, and that is the expensive one.
The fast failure
A braided supply hose lets go behind a washing machine, or a water heater tank splits. Water arrives quickly and in quantity, somebody notices, and the water gets shut off. It is loud, it is alarming, and it is usually a straightforward extraction and drying job because it was caught within the hour.
The slow failure
A dishwasher seal weeps a small amount every cycle under the cabinet run. A fridge ice-maker line drips behind the appliance where nobody looks. A shower pan leaks a little into the floor below. None of them produces a visible flood; all of them keep a hidden assembly wet for months.
By the time it shows — a soft spot in the floor, a cabinet kick that has swollen, a stain on the ceiling below, a smell that comes and goes — the material damage is already done and mould is generally part of the scope. The cost is not driven by the volume of water. It is driven by the number of weeks.
The five-minute check that prevents most of this
- Look under the kitchen sink with a torch, at the back corners rather than the front. A dark line on the cabinet floor or a swollen particleboard edge is a leak that has been running.
- Pull the washing machine forward far enough to see the hoses. Rubber hoses have a service life and braided stainless ones are cheap; the failure is at the crimp, not in the middle.
- Check the drip tray and the floor around the water heater, and note its age. Tanks fail from the bottom.
- Feel the floor in front of the dishwasher with a bare foot. A section that gives slightly is a wet subfloor.
- On a seasonal property, do all four in October rather than in May.
Kitchen water damage under cabinets
Cabinet boxes are usually particleboard or MDF, which swell irreversibly and do not recover when dried. Where a run of base cabinets has been sitting in a slow leak the honest scope includes removing the affected boxes to reach and dry the subfloor beneath them, and that is frequently the largest single line on the estimate.
Water heater failure in a finished basement
A tank that lets go in a finished basement releases its full contents and then keeps supplying until somebody closes the valve. The damage tends to be wide and shallow rather than deep — floor, underlay, the bottom of the drywall around the whole room — which makes it a large drying footprint on a small water volume, and it is worth knowing where that shut-off valve is before you need it.
FAQ
Appliance leaks — common questions
The floor is dry now. Is the subfloor dry?
Not necessarily, and the two are measured separately. A surface can read dry while the material underneath it holds moisture, which is the whole reason meters exist. On a slow leak the subfloor and the cabinet bottoms are the materials that matter, and neither can be judged by touch.
Will insurance cover a slow leak that has been going for months?
Often not. Most Ontario wordings cover sudden and accidental water escape and exclude damage from a leak that occurred gradually over time, which is precisely the situation with a weeping dishwasher seal. That is worth knowing before you report it, because a declined claim still appears on your history.
Do you replace the cabinets and the floor?
No. We remove what has to come out to dry the structure, and we document what was removed and why so your contractor or your adjuster can price the rebuild accurately. Keeping the restoration and the rebuild separate is better for you: it keeps the person deciding what must be removed from being the person who profits from removing it.
Talk to a Collingwood water damage restoration company
Tell us where the water is, where you think it came from, and when you first saw it. Those three answers decide almost everything — whether this is an afternoon of drying or a scope with removal in it, whether it is likely to be an insurable event, and whether the honest advice is to stop reading and shut the water off first.