The four equipment families, honestly compared
| Tool | What it does | Cost order | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Listening stick / acoustic rod | Operator listens for leak noise at fittings and valves | Hundreds of rand | Entirely skill-dependent; useless in noisy environments and on plastic pipe |
| Ground microphone | Amplifies leak noise through the surface to pinpoint for excavation | Tens of thousands | Slow over area; works best on confirmed sections, not for searching a suburb |
| Leak noise loggers | Sensors clamped along mains overnight; flag sections with persistent leak noise | Per-unit thousands, deployed in fleets | Localises to a section, not a point; plastic pipe transmits noise poorly |
| Leak correlator | Two sensors + velocity maths pinpoint the leak between them | The six-figure end | Needs trained operators and accurate pipe data; the classic idle expensive asset |
Prices vary widely by brand and spec — treat the "cost order" column as orientation and get current quotes. The pattern that matters: cost scales with precision, and precision is only useful once you already know roughly where to look.
The question the equipment can't answer
Every tool above assumes you know which zone to search. In a network losing water across dozens of kilometres of main, that assumption is the expensive part: crews with correlators sweeping healthy pipe is how leak-detection programmes burn their budgets. Zone metering answers it structurally — district metered areas with telemetered inlet meters rank zones by minimum night flow, so the pinpointing equipment (owned, hired or contracted) goes only where the data says a leak lives. Detection latency drops from "when the road floods" to "the night the night-flow trend jumped".
Buy, hire, or contract the survey?
- Buy when leak-finding is a standing weekly activity — a metro or large utility with dedicated crews. The instruments earn their keep only in trained, frequent hands.
- Hire when you have episodic campaigns — quarterly sweeps of the worst zones — and someone competent to operate. Hire also lets you test which technology suits your pipe materials before owning any.
- Contract a survey service when you lack the specialist skills: leak-survey firms bring correlators, loggers and — crucially — operators who use them daily. For most municipalities and estates, buying the finding-service and owning the monitoring is the durable split.
- Monitor permanently in every case: the zone meters and pressure loggers are the asset that works every night, tells you when to summon the pinpointing, and proves the repair worked afterwards.
What we do — and deliberately don't
addanode doesn't sell listening sticks or correlators, and we don't run digging crews. We build the permanent layer: DMA metering, night-flow analysis, pressure monitoring and burst alerts on the addaNet platform — the system that makes every rand spent on pinpointing equipment or survey services land on an actual leak. If you're comparing equipment quotes right now, the most useful thing we can tell you is which zones deserve them.