Last reviewed and updated: 2026-09-28
Downtown Marietta covers the commercial core around the Square, shops, restaurants, offices and upper-floor residential above them. It is a different leak problem from a detached house, because the buildings are attached, the plumbing is stacked, and a business cannot simply close for a day while someone investigates.
In a party-wall building, water that appears in one unit routinely originates in another. Establishing which one is the first job, and it is rarely obvious.
HOA, shared walls and shared meters
In attached and managed housing, the first question is usually not where the leak is but whose it is.
In stacked or attached units, water appearing in a ceiling frequently originated in a different unit entirely, because it travels along joists and through penetrations before it shows. Moisture Moisture mapping across units, rather than guesswork, is what establishes where it actually started, and that is what settles the owner-versus-association question.
On a shared meter, nobody owns the leak: the community pays for water lost inside individual units and residents have no visibility of it. A proportion of units in any multi-unit property have a running toilet at any given moment, and in aggregate that is usually the largest single item. The account holder for a leak credit is the association, not the resident.
Pools, irrigation and everything outside the house
Not every leak is indoors, and the outdoor ones are the easiest to miss because they produce no symptom you can see or hear.
Irrigation runs underground, on a timer, usually overnight. A cracked lateral or a valve that will not seat fully wastes thousands of gallons before anything surfaces. Close the irrigation supply and re-check the meter, if it stops, the system is your answer.
Pools lose water to evaporation, so the question is always whether the loss is normal. Roughly a quarter to half an inch a day in a Georgia summer is expected. The bucket test settles it, and whether the loss changes with the pump running tells you which side of the plumbing is at fault. An automatic fill valve will mask the whole thing, which is why pool leak detection begins with the bucket test, the level stays perfect while the bill climbs.
The buried service line from the meter to the house is yours, not the utility's. Watch for a strip of lawn that stays soggy or grows greener than everything around it.
Freeze damage and winter failures
A hard Marietta freeze reliably produces a run of burst-pipe calls, and the pattern is consistent.
The vulnerable runs are the ones in unconditioned space: crawlspaces, garages, exterior walls, attics and outdoor hose bibs. Water expands as it freezes, splits the pipe, and then does nothing at all until the thaw, which is when the damage actually appears, often while nobody is home. Water actively escaping is an emergency: close the main shut-off first.
Before winter, insulate exposed runs, seal crawlspace vents, disconnect hose pipes and know where your main shut-off valve is and that it actually turns. During a hard freeze, let a tap drip and open cabinet doors under sinks on exterior walls.
Worth knowing: Cobb County explicitly excludes faucets left dripping during freezing weather from its leak credit, the county treats that roughly 50 gallons as normal use, not a leak.
Meter still moving with everything off?
That is water leaving the system somewhere. We locate it before anything is opened, anywhere in Marietta and Cobb County.
What your insurance will and will not pay for
Georgia homeowners policies generally pay for leak detection only as part of a covered loss, not as a standalone inspection.
Where a leak has caused damage your policy covers, insurers commonly pay to locate the leak, gain access to the pipe, and restore what had to be opened. What a policy does and does not cover is set out on the homeowners insurance page, a public adjuster described typical handling as covering "leak detection, access to the pipe, treating the soil, and pouring new concrete into the void." The pipe repair itself is frequently treated as maintenance and excluded.
The two exclusions that defeat most claims are earth movement and gradual deterioration or wear and tear. A slow pinhole that ran for months is easy to characterize as gradual, which is why documenting when symptoms first appeared matters so much. Read your own policy, and speak to your carrier before work begins.
Which water utility bills you here
Neighborhoods in and immediately around the city are typically billed by Marietta Power & Water, often on a combined electric and water bill, rather than by Cobb County Water System. The two utilities run entirely separate leak credit processes, so check the utility name printed on your bill before you apply for anything, sending the application to the wrong one is a common and avoidable delay.
Local notes
Detection work downtown is normally scheduled around trading hours, overnight or before opening. That is not only a courtesy: acoustic detection works considerably better when the background noise of a working street, an HVAC plant and a kitchen has stopped. Access across tenancies usually needs arranging in advance, so the earlier a building manager is involved the faster the job goes.
Frequently asked questions
Can leak detection be done without closing my downtown business?
Yes, and it normally is. Acoustic work is scheduled overnight or before opening, which also produces better results because background noise from the street, HVAC plant and kitchens is at its lowest.
Water is coming through my ceiling from the unit above. Whose responsibility is it?
It depends on where the failed pipe actually sits, inside a unit, in a party wall, or in common plumbing, and on the building's governing documents or lease. Establishing the exact location first is what settles the question, which is why precise detection matters more in attached buildings than anywhere else.
Is Downtown Marietta the same as the Marietta Square area?
They overlap. We treat Downtown as the commercial core and upper-floor units around the Square, and the Square area more broadly as the surrounding historic residential streets.