The loop that heats a campus is leaking treated water by the tonne.

It's the location of leaks on buried thermal distribution networks — the hot-water, glycol, and chilled-water mains that carry heating and cooling from a central plant to multiple buildings across a campus, hospital, civic precinct, or district energy utility. These loops run pressurised and treated, often for kilometres underground, and a breach silently bleeds treated, conditioned, chemically-dosed water around the clock. We locate the failing section before it becomes an excavation-by-guesswork or a service interruption to a whole precinct.

Scale and setting. In-building mechanical leak detection works the risers, fan-coil lines, and plant-room piping within one structure — see our chilled water and boiler-system services for that. District energy work is the buried distribution between buildings: longer runs, deeper burial, sparser access, and far higher consequence when a main fails. It's closer to municipal water-main work than to a single building's mechanical room, and it uses corridor-scale methods accordingly.

A sequence matched to the corridor. A buried hot loop is the ideal thermal target — escaping heated water produces a strong surface signature — so our aerial thermal survey often screens the alignment first to rank suspect sections. Acoustic correlation pinpoints pressurised leaks; tracer gas finds the quiet ones on plastic or low-pressure sections; and GPR images the corridor where routing is uncertain. The aerial layer ranks, the ground crews confirm — one accountable report.

Largely yes — acoustic, thermal, and aerial work happen on the live, pressurised, operating system (pressure and heat are what make the leak detectable). Isolation is only needed if a section requires tracer gas testing, which is planned around the operator's load and redundancy. The point of the survey is precisely to avoid the unplanned shutdown a failure would force.

A buried thermal-loop leak wastes treated, chemically-dosed, heated or chilled water continuously — energy, make-up water, and treatment chemicals, every hour — and operators typically find a single confirmed leak repays the survey many times over within a season. Add the avoided cost of exploratory excavation in the wrong spot, and the avoided risk of an unplanned outage to a connected hospital or precinct, and early detection is among the highest-return work on the network.

Often, yes — buried hot loops trace themselves thermally, so an aerial pass can recover the alignment of a loop whose drawings were lost decades ago, and GPR plus EM tracing confirm routing and depth at the points that matter. Many campus operators get a current, documented map of their distribution network as a by-product of the leak survey.