Find it before you demolish anything.

Water travels. The stain on your first-floor ceiling is frequently nowhere near the joint that caused it, because water runs along the top of a joist until it finds a nail hole, a seam or the low point of a duct and drops through there instead. That is why the question on this kind of call is never "where is the stain" - it is "where does the water start", and answering it with a saw is how people end up with four holes in a ceiling and a leak that is still running.

Most of our leak calls start with a bill. Del-Co, Columbus and the City of Delaware all send consumption data, and a household that has not changed its habits does not double its usage in a month by accident. Somewhere between the meter and a fixture, water is leaving the system - a pinhole in copper, a failed slab line, a toilet flapper passing silently, or a service line weeping into the yard where you will never see it because the ground drinks it. Each of those has a different signature and a very different repair cost, which is why finding out which one you have comes before anyone quotes a repair.

So we narrow before we open. Isolation testing tells us whether the loss is inside or underground. Acoustic listening finds pressurised supply leaks through concrete and drywall. Thermal imaging shows a hot line running under a floor. Meter observation confirms whether a leak is still active. By the time we cut anything, we know what is behind it - and if the honest answer is that a $12 flapper has been costing you $40 a month, that is what you will hear.