Last reviewed and updated: 2026-09-28
Dunleith is a named residential community in the Marietta area. In neighborhoods built out in a single phase, the plumbing tends to be consistent from house to house, same era, same material, same installer, which makes diagnosis faster and means failures often arrive in clusters rather than one at a time.
The starting point is always the same: confirm the leak at the meter, establish whether it is inside the house or out in the buried service line, then locate it without opening anything.
A bill that jumped, with nothing visible
The most common call is not a flood. It is a water bill that doubled with no change in habits and nothing wrong that anyone can see.
The usual causes, cheapest first: a toilet flapper that no longer seals, an irrigation valve that will not close fully, a buried service line leak draining into the soil, and a supply line failing under a slab. The full order of checks is on the high water bill page. A Cobb County household reported 89,000 gallons producing a bill of roughly $1,400. That volume does not come from a drip. It comes from something running continuously for weeks.
Rule out the toilets first. Food coloring in each tank, twenty minutes without flushing, then look in the bowl. Color in the bowl means that flapper is leaking, and it is a few dollars to fix.
Tree roots and older sewer laterals
Marietta's mature tree canopy is one of the best things about living here and one of the hardest things on its sewer laterals.
Roots seek moisture and find it escaping at the joints of older clay and cast iron pipe. Once inside, they trap solids, which is why the first symptom is usually repeated backups rather than a visible leak. Cutting the roots clears the blockage but not the defect that let them in, so they grow back.
Drain lines are not pressurized, so acoustic listening does not work on them. They are diagnosed with a camera inspection that shows the inside of the line, cracks, joint offsets, root masses, bellies where the pipe has sagged, and with smoke testing for odor sources a camera cannot see. Repeated backups on the same line point to a structural repair rather than another cleaning.
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.
Want the leak found before anything is opened?
Acoustic listening, thermal imaging, pressure testing and tracer gas narrow it to a few inches first, so only that area has to be touched.
Supply leak or drain leak: the timing test
One observation you can make yourself narrows the problem in half, and it costs nothing.
A supply line is pressurized all the time, so a supply leak runs constantly, day and night, whether anyone is home or not. A drain line only carries water while something is draining, so a drain leak appears in the minutes after a shower, a bath, a dishwasher or a washing-machine cycle, and then stops.
That distinction decides which equipment is used. Pressurized leaks are found acoustically, by listening for the hiss of escaping water through concrete or soil. Drain leaks make almost no sound at all, so they are diagnosed with a camera inspection, smoke testing or a hydrostatic test instead. Tell us which pattern you are seeing and the visit gets considerably shorter.
Which water utility bills you here
Most addresses outside the City of Marietta utility service area are billed by Cobb County Water System, which allows a partial leak credit once per rolling 12-month period across no more than two affected months, with proof of repair required. A Marietta mailing address does not by itself make you a city utility customer, the name printed on your bill is what settles it.
Local notes
On lots with established irrigation, the seasonal pattern is the tell. If the water bill climbs every spring when the controller comes back on and settles when it is shut down for winter, the sprinkler system is the first place to look, either a genuine leak or a schedule running longer than anyone realizes.
Frequently asked questions
Do you cover Dunleith?
Yes. Dunleith is within our regular Marietta and Cobb County service area.
Which water utility serves this community?
Most addresses outside the City of Marietta utility area are billed by Cobb County Water System, which allows a partial leak credit once per rolling 12-month period across no more than two affected months. Confirm from the utility name on your bill.
What is the first thing I should do?
Run the water meter test. Turn everything off and watch the low-flow indicator, any movement confirms a leak. Closing the main house valve and re-checking then tells you whether it is inside the house or in the buried service line.