Only someone who has spent days staring at broken tiles, exposed substrate, damaged walls and furniture, then scrambling to buy new flooring, fixtures and paint (sometimes for the neighbor too) really understands how serious this problem gets.
How many of us live in fear that the whole nightmare will repeat itself next winter, or the next time the neighbor's water finds its way into our place? So before spring, when you're about to repaint and the dampness, mold or bubbling on the wall or ceiling has almost dried up on its own, wouldn't it make more sense to check that the actual source was fixed?
Oh no, the ceiling is wet...
Where is the dampness in the ceiling or walls actually coming from? That's the hard part: the source of a leak often has nothing to do with where the dampness shows up. Water can enter at one point, travel through the structure, and surface somewhere else entirely.
Sometimes it's easy to pin down and cheap to fix, and if that's your case, count yourself lucky. But dampness problems have a reputation for dragging on, costing a lot, and getting diagnosed by trial and error, often by a waterproofer whose job is to apply sealing materials and tear up and relay flooring.
Get the diagnosis wrong and you pay for it: more floor broken open than necessary, work that sometimes didn't need doing, and the whole ordeal repeating next year, at your place and the neighbor's. Cheap turns expensive fast.
That's especially true for a luxury apartment or roof, where you'd rather not treat the whole surface. Say you have a 100-square-meter roof and waterproofing runs around ₪500 per square meter: that's ₪50,000 or more you'd rather avoid spending. Better to invest in a leak detection expert who finds the actual source first, so you only pay for a targeted repair.
Waterproofer or leak detection expert?
A leak detection engineer brings more than an engineering background: years of fieldwork give them a trained eye. A waterproofer, by contrast, is committed to physically carrying out the sealing work, and if it happens to be in the right spot, you got lucky.
A leak-detection engineer's judgment also rests on data from professional tools like a moisture meter and a thermal imaging camera, which in many cases give a clear, unambiguous answer on their own; most dampness checks come down to exactly that.
When the source is more complicated, the engineer might run auxiliary tests, like flooding a small suspect area with water. These work best specifically when it isn't raining, so don't assume winter is the ideal season for leak detection: it usually isn't.
In practice, that might mean cordoning off a quarter of the roof and running a controlled 72-hour flood test, or spraying water from sprinklers onto walls. Once the source is confirmed, that's the time to bring in a good contractor, and we can recommend one.
So what's an accurate diagnosis from a waterproofing and leak expert actually worth? Certainty that the real problem has been found and fixed, a cheaper, targeted repair, and next year's rain becoming something to welcome again.
The engineers of Arad Bedek Bayit, led by building engineer Ron Arad, whom courts appoint as their own expert on construction defects. The company has been inspecting apartments and buildings since 2001. Engineer Ron Arad · More about the company