Honest Advice From The Leaky Finders: Lanzarote’s Premium Leak Detection and Repair Company
When water appears where it definitely shouldn’t, the panic is instant. The advice you actually need? Probably not what you’d expect from us.
You’ve just discovered water where water absolutely should not be. Perhaps it’s a damp patch colonising your living room ceiling. Perhaps your water meter is spinning cheerfully despite nothing being switched on. Perhaps you’ve walked into the bathroom and the floor has developed an unexpected enthusiasm for being a swimming pool. Whatever it is, the feeling is immediate and universal. The stomach drops. The mind races. And the next thing you do matters more than you think.
Who Ya Gonna Call? Not Us. Not Yet.
The Call You Should Actually Make First
Before you call a leak detection company (including us) call your insurance company.
We’ve been saying it for years, even when it cost us jobs. We meant it then. We mean it now. If you have home insurance, there is a good chance your leak is covered, or at least partially covered. Your insurer needs to be involved regardless, and if you engage a contractor before making a claim, you risk complicating that claim significantly.
Call them first. Always. We’ve turned away bookings to make this point. We’ll probably do it again.
A Word About Facebook
This is going to sting slightly for some people.
Because here is what actually happens within thirty seconds: someone in the household announces they are going to post in the Facebook group. Dear reader: do not post in the Facebook group.
Facebook groups are one of the great innovations of modern life. You can find a good dentist, sell a sofa, argue about planning permission, and discover that someone three streets over has been feeding your cat. Wonderful. But using a Facebook group to find a leak detection specialist is a bit like asking the pub for a recommendation on open heart surgery. The pub, at least, is honest about not being a doctor.
Here is a thing that happens in comment sections — we say this with no specific company in mind: half those “defo use these guys” and “100% recommend” replies are from people who have never had a leak in their lives. Friends, family, someone who still owes a favour, the business owner on a second account. The enthusiasm is real. The experience is not. You cannot tell which is which, and given that a badly handled job can leave you with a demolished bathroom and a leak that is still leaking, that distinction is worth taking seriously.
“Any reputable company in this area will always point you towards your insurance company first. If a company’s opening pitch is based on price, they probably have little else to offer.”
Back to That Insurance Call. Did You Know?
This is the part where things get interesting.
So you’ve stepped away from Facebook. Good. Now for the punchline.
After several months of applications, compliance checks, qualification vetting, and a quantity of Spanish paperwork we will not attempt to describe without emotional support nearby, Canary Detect has been officially approved as a registered leak detection provider for one of Spain’s largest home assistance networks.
We are now live on a network covering policyholders from 21 major insurance companies operating across Lanzarote.
We didn’t pitch for this. We didn’t fill in an online form and cross our fingers. They came to us, based on our track record, our qualifications, and the working relationship we’d built with them informally over the years. When we say we are trusted by insurance companies, we mean it in a legally documented, compliance-checked, professionally vetted sense. Not the “they’ve never had cause to complain” sense.
So. Call your insurer first. There is now a very good chance they send Canary Detect — The Leaky Finders — anyway. The advice hasn’t changed. It just has a much better punchline.
If Your Insurer Says “Find Your Own Contractor”
Sometimes your insurer will instruct you to source your own approved contractor and submit the invoice. This is fine. What is not fine is picking up the phone to the first company that pops up in a Facebook comment without asking a single question. Before anyone opens a van door, ask the following:
Here is the list. Print it out if you like.
- Do they have qualified plumbers in-house? Always ask. Some companies operating in Lanzarote might be capable of finding your leak, but the closest they have to a plumbing qualification is a 50m breaststroke certificate from when they were 13. Get the answer in writing.
- Are they specifically qualified in leak detection? Proper detection uses multiple technologies: acoustic listening, thermal imaging, tracer gas, pipe location and more. If their entire methodology is a one-sentence price promise, that should tell you something.
- Can they manage the complete job: detection, excavation, repair, and full reinstatement? Finding it is the beginning, not the end.
- Are they approved by any insurance networks or water authorities? Third-party vetting is not nothing.
- Will they put everything in writing before they start? Scope, method, and price. All of it.
If you ask whether they have a qualified in-house team and they change the subject, that is your answer. You’re welcome to ask us the same question. We enjoy it.
Finding the leak is only a small part of the job. What happens after is where it counts, and it is what separates the professionals from the people who leave you with two holes in the floor and a number for a tiler they vaguely know.
Some jobs are tidy. In and out, minimal disruption, the tile barely knows we were there, done by lunch. And then some are a pig. Pipes embedded in concrete that nobody recorded anywhere, because of course they didn’t. A previous repair underneath the previous repair. Infrastructure that has no business being where it is, doing things it has no business doing. These jobs exist in every trade. In ours, they exist rather more often than anyone’s marketing would suggest.
When it turns out to be one of those, you need a company that has seen it before and is not going to hand you a map and a phone number for a tiler. That is what in-house means. That is why it matters.
In. Pipe located. Repair underway.
Out. Floor reinstated. You’d never know.
Yes, We’re the Premium Option. We’re Fine With That.
Since you’re going to ask about price anyway.
Canary Detect is not two blokes with expensive gadgets and a can-do attitude. We are a team of ten, qualified across every discipline this work involves: detection, plumbing, excavation, tiling, and full reinstatement.
We pioneered the multi-technology, pipe-location-before-leak-location methodology in Lanzarote. We coined “no find, no fee” — a policy funded entirely from confidence, because we always find it. We have never had cause to invoke it. Which is either very impressive, or proof that we are considerably better at finding leaks than we are at writing modest sentences about ourselves. Possibly both. Others have since adopted versions of our approach, which we note with the quiet satisfaction of people who built something worth copying. You can buy the same equipment. You cannot buy the expertise that tells you which piece to deploy and when.
We have 115 five-star Google reviews, all from customers with actual leaks. Not one from a cousin, a girlfriend, a business partner, or a bloke who owed us a favour. You are welcome to read every single one.
What If You’re Not Insured?
Not everyone has cover, and not everyone can get it. That does not mean you are on your own.
Don’t mistake premium for expensive. They are not the same thing. There is a model that runs through this industry: a survey priced low enough to get through the door, and then a repair quote that makes up the difference. The cheap part was always just the beginning.
We cannot quote for a repair before we find the leak. Nobody honestly can. What we can tell you is that our survey fee is priced to cover the work involved in doing it properly, not to get us through the door. And when we do quote for repair, it is a fair quote. No recovery margin. No second bill that looks nothing like the first conversation.
Insured or paying direct, you can have confidence that from detection to reinstatement, everything is handled in-house by our own team — a company trusted by insurance networks, water boards, and hundreds of real customers.
One More Thing. About Not Getting To That Panic in the first Place
Everything above assumes you are already mid-emergency. Water where it shouldn’t be, phone in hand, Facebook tab open. But what about the leak you do not know about yet?
The leak running silently inside a wall for weeks. The toilet passing water overnight since January. The water bill that causes a small household cardiac event. By the time anyone knows, it has been running up the bill and the damage for months.
This is the thinking behind LeakGuard. A water monitoring system we have developed and are rolling out across Lanzarote. Cloud-connected, running around the clock, watching your property’s consumption in real time. Not just you watching it — us too. Alarms are set on both sides, so when the numbers don’t add up, it gets flagged in hours rather than discovered in month four when the wall is wet and Canal Gestión is keen on a conversation.
You can log in and see your usage day by day and hour by hour. Garden irrigation, pool consumption, whatever the toilet has been up to.
So. This article is called Who Ya Gonna Call. But LeakGuard flips that entirely. It is us calling you — proactively, at the first sign of something wrong, before it turns into the kind of problem that costs hundreds or thousands in water bills and damage.
More at leakguardlanzarote.com.
Canary Detect, The Leaky Finders · Lanzarote’s acoustic leak detection specialists · canary-detect.com