Active leak right now?

What to do in the next hour

1. Isolate power to anything the water can reachWater tracking across a floor or down a wall toward a power point, a distribution board, a lift motor room or a pump is the part of this that hurts people. Switch the affected circuits off at the board. If water is anywhere near a board or you are not certain which circuits are affected, do not stand in it and get an electrician, not a waterproofer.
2. Get vehicles out from under itIn a car park, moving cars out of the affected bays is the single highest-value five minutes available to you. Water carrying calcite off a soffit stains paintwork, and if a repair crew arrives to work overhead, resin drip onto a bonnet costs more than the repair does. Cone off the bays and put a note on the noticeboard.
3. Photograph it while it is actually happeningWide shot showing where in the building you are, medium shot showing the wall or soffit, close shot of the water at the point it emerges, and a ten-second video with the sound on so the flow rate is obvious. Include something for scale, a hand or a tape. Photograph the ceiling, the floor and any stock, fit-out or vehicles affected. This is the evidence an insurer will want and it is also what lets us triage without being there.
4. Contain it, do not chase itBuckets, a wet vacuum, a squeegee toward a floor waste, plastic over anything that matters. Getting water off the floor and away from stock is worth doing. Trying to find and plug the source in the dark is not, and on a wall with head behind it, pulling at a crack can turn a weep into a flow.
5. Do not let anyone bag rapid-set over the crackThis is the expensive mistake and it happens most often at night with the best of intentions. Smearing a quick-set mortar across the face of a leaking crack blocks the crack mouth without filling the path behind it, so the water simply builds up and comes out somewhere else, and the plug then has to be drilled out before anything can be injected. Hydraulic cement has a legitimate use in this trade, packed into a joint to kill flow before injection, but that is a targeted step in a method, not a bag of product spread over a wall.
6. Rule out a burst serviceIf the water is clear, has no correlation with rain, and is running at a steady rate day and night, check the water meter with every tap in the building closed. If it is turning, you have a plumbing problem and you want a plumber tonight, not a waterproofer tomorrow. This takes two minutes and it changes who you call.
7. Send the photosIn hours, ring and send them while you are on the phone. Out of hours, send them through the photo form with the building type, the suburb and a sentence about when it started. You will get a call at 7am with what we think it is, whether it is a same-day job, and what it will take.

How to reach us, and what actually happens when you do

In business hours, Monday to Friday 7am to 5pm, the phone is answered by a person who does this work rather than a call centre taking a message. On that call you will get an opinion on what the leak most likely is, and a straight answer about whether a crew can reach you today. Sometimes the answer is yes and sometimes it is tomorrow at 7am, and you will be told which on the call rather than after four hours of waiting.

Outside those hours we run a photo channel instead of a phone that nobody answers. Send three to five photos and a short video, tell us the building type and the suburb, and we ring you at 7am. In practice that gets you a diagnosis and a booked time sooner than a night-time answering service would, because the person calling you back has already looked at the photos.

We are not going to advertise round-the-clock attendance. Running it properly means a rostered on-call crew, a second vehicle stocked and a supervisor awake, and almost nobody in this category actually funds that. What they fund is a badge. An unanswered emergency call at midnight is worse than an honest callback at 7am, because it burns the hour you could have spent isolating power and moving cars.

The photos that let us triage without being there

A good photo set answers four questions and gets you a real answer at 7am instead of a site visit next week. A bad photo set is a close-up of a wet patch with no context, which tells us nothing.

• Where in the building: a wide shot showing the space, so we can tell a garage from a car park soffit from a lift pit lobby.
• The line, or the absence of one: is there a single crack you can point at, a straight joint line, several cracks, or is the whole area damp with no defined line? That one answer changes the material and sometimes changes the trade.
• The flow rate: a ten-second video with the sound on. Damp, beading, weeping, running and gushing are five different jobs, and video settles it in a way that a still photograph cannot.
• The width: hold a business card edge, about 0.3 mm, and a credit card edge, about 0.8 mm, against the crack and photograph both.
• The history: any white powdery salt bloom, any hard mineral deposits or stalactites forming, any rust staining along the crack line. Salt bloom means water has been moving through for a while. Rust staining means the conversation may be about concrete repair rather than sealing.
• The context: what is above the leak, and what is outside it. A photo of the deck, planter box, driveway or garden bed on the other side of that wall is frequently more useful than the photo of the leak.

What we can genuinely do the same day

Emergency work in this trade means one thing: killing the flow. That is a real capability and it makes an immediate difference. It is not the finished repair, and any contractor telling you it is has committed you to a second job.

What has to wait, and why waiting is correct

The parts of the method that cannot be compressed into an emergency visit are the parts that make the repair last, which is why an emergency attendance and a completed repair are two separate line items on our quotes.

Cut-back waits a minimum of 24 hours. Packers stay in the concrete while the seal develops, then get cut off 10 to 20 mm below the surface and plugged. Anyone pulling packers out the same day to finish the job is letting the water back in.

Diagnosis of the real path waits for the water to stop. Under heavy flow you cannot map where water enters as opposed to where it exits, and on a suspended slab the entry point is regularly metres from the drip. And make-good waits too: render, paint, tiling and coatings need a cured, dry substrate, and cured polyurethane bleed on the face has to be ground off before anything will bond to it.

When the emergency is not an injection job at all

A fast callback is only worth having if the person calling back will tell you when to call somebody else. These are the emergencies we hand on, usually within the first two minutes of the conversation.

• A burst or leaking service. Clear water, no rain correlation, meter turning with the taps off. Plumber tonight.
• A blocked or overwhelmed stormwater system, a failed sump pump, or surface water running into the building. That is drainage and it is where the water is coming from, so sealing the wall makes the head against it worse.
• Sewage or contaminated water. Restoration and health risk before anything else, and not our trade.
• Anything structural. A new diagonal crack, a crack that widens toward the top, a lean, a bulge, a step, a floor level change or a sagging soffit. That is an engineer this week, not a waterproofer tonight, and sealing it would hide a warning sign.
• Rust staining, spalling or hollow drummy concrete along the crack. Corrosion is opening that crack from the inside and sealing it traps a problem that keeps expanding.
• A flooded lift pit. Nobody enters it. It is a confined space under AS 2865, the lift contractor performs the isolation and lock-out, and the repair is scheduled around that rather than done tonight.
• Water appearing on cold surfaces in a still, humid, poorly ventilated room with no rain correlation. That is very likely condensation, and there is a free 48-hour plastic sheet test that will tell you before anyone quotes.

Wet season, November to March

South East Queensland's leak enquiries are not evenly spread across the year. They arrive in a band from November to March, and they arrive in bursts: an east-coast low or a stalled trough parked over the coast for two days will lift enquiry volume by five to ten times over a normal week, and every specialist in the region gets that spike on the same afternoon.

Two practical consequences. First, the crew that could have been there in a day in August is booked for a week in February, so the leak you noticed as a damp patch in spring is much cheaper and quicker to deal with than the same leak running down a wall in a storm week. Second, a storm week is the best diagnostic opportunity you will get all year. A wall that is bone dry in September tells you nothing. Photograph and mark everything while it is actively wet, because that evidence is worth more than any inspection done afterwards.

This is also why prolonged rain, rather than heavy rain, is the pattern that matters below ground. Hydrostatic pressure, which is simply the push of standing water, builds as the ground stays saturated. A leak that appears on day three of a wet week and never appeared during a single violent storm is telling you the water table is the driver, and that changes the scope.

Storm-season readiness for buildings that go wet every year

If you manage a building that leaks in the same three places every February, the work that pays is done in September, not in the middle of it. None of the following is an injection sale and most of it is free.

• Clear the subsoil drains and the weep holes. A perforated ag line crushed, silted or root-blocked, or weep holes rendered over during a repaint, is behind a very large share of the enquiries we take. Clearing them is sometimes the entire fix.
• Check where the downpipes discharge. A downpipe discharging at the footing, or a driveway falling toward the building, will beat any seal you buy.
• Test the sump pumps and their float switches, and check whether there is a second pump or an alarm. A lift pit sump that fails during an east-coast low takes the lift out of service with it.
• Clear planter box and podium outlets. A planter box with a blocked outlet becomes a bathtub, which loads the structure and pushes water into the ceiling below.
• Mark and date every known damp patch now, and photograph them dry. A before-photograph taken in spring is what tells you in March whether something got worse or was always like that.
• Get the quotes done out of season. Traffic management, after-hours access and crew availability are all cheaper and easier to arrange in October than in the middle of a wet week, and after-hours labour carries a penalty of 30 to 100 per cent whenever it is arranged.

What it costs

Indicative only, and excluding GST. Build a line-by-line estimate for your own job with the price book, or read the working behind the rates in the 2026 cost guide.

Questions we actually get asked

It is 9pm and water is coming through the car park ceiling. What do I actually do?

In order: move the vehicles out of the affected bays and cone them off, isolate power to anything the water can reach, put containment under the drip so it is not tracking across the deck, and photograph and video the whole thing while it is running, with the sound on. Then send the photos through the form with the building and the suburb, and stop. Do not let anyone drill overhead in the dark, and do not let anyone bag rapid-set over the joint. If the slab is post-tensioned, which is common in car park decks, nothing gets drilled at all until a ground-penetrating radar scan and a written engineer approval exist. We will call you at 7am.

Why don't you advertise round-the-clock emergency service like everyone else?

Because doing it properly means a rostered on-call crew, a second vehicle stocked with resin and a pump, and a supervisor awake, and we would rather charge you for work than for a roster you rarely need. There is also a practical point: very little about the outcome of a concrete leak changes between midnight and 7am once the power is isolated, the vehicles are moved and the water is being contained. What does change the outcome is somebody attacking the crack with the wrong product in the dark, or an unanswered phone burning the hour you needed. An honest 7am callback from somebody who has already looked at your photos beats a badge that rings out.

Can you inject while it is still raining and the crack is still running?

Yes, and for a water-reactive polyurethane an actively wet crack is exactly the condition it is designed for, because it needs water to cure. The limitation is not the resin, it is the diagnosis. Under heavy flow you cannot reliably work out where water enters as opposed to where it exits, and on a suspended slab those two points are often metres apart. So a wet-weather attendance is normally a flow-killing visit followed by proper mapping and a completed repair once the flow is down. The one place rain genuinely helps is verification: watching a finished repair through a rain event is the best proof available.

Someone is on their way with a bag of rapid-set cement. Should I let them?

Not across the face of the crack, no. Spreading a quick-set mortar over a leaking crack blocks the mouth of it without filling the path through the wall, so the water builds up behind and finds the next weakest point, often a metre or three away and often somewhere worse. It then has to be drilled out before anything can be injected, so you have paid twice. Hydraulic cement does have a legitimate place in this trade, packed hard into a joint or a hole to cut flow before injection begins, but that is a targeted step inside a method by someone who is going to inject afterwards, not a bag of product smeared on a wall at 10pm.

Our lift pit has flooded. Can you come out tonight?

No, and nobody should. A lift pit is a confined space under AS 2865, which legally requires a written entry permit, atmospheric testing before and during entry by a competent person, a standby person outside who does no productive work, communications and a rescue plan with the equipment present. It also contains live equipment, and only the lift contractor performs the isolation and lock-out, never the waterproofing crew. Tonight, the right calls are your lift contractor and, if the sump pump has failed, a pump service. The sealing work gets scheduled around the lift isolation, and the confined space cost is itemised on the quote at $800 to $2,000 per day rather than hidden in a rate.

Will insurance cover an emergency leak like this?

We cannot advise on your policy and would not try, but the general pattern is worth knowing so you photograph the right things. Sudden accidental damage is commonly covered, while gradual water ingress and defective waterproofing are commonly excluded, which is exactly why the timestamped photographs and video you take tonight matter. In a strata building the leak is usually through common property even when it shows up inside a lot, so the body corporate is normally the party that scopes and pays for the rectification. Our diagnosis, moisture readings and photographic record are useful evidence either way, and they are far more useful taken before the repair than reconstructed afterwards.