People service their furnace annually. Almost nobody has their plumbing looked at until something goes wrong — and plumbing failures are the ones that damage a house.
That asymmetry is odd when you think about it. The system most likely to cause expensive damage is the one nobody inspects.
The five things you can check yourself, this afternoon
Find your main shutoff and turn it. Locate it, turn it fully closed and open again. A valve that has not moved in a decade may not close when you need it to, and finding that out during an emergency is the worst possible time. This is the single most valuable ten minutes in this article.
Look at your washing machine hoses. Rubber hoses have a service life and they fail suddenly, at full pressure, usually when nobody is home. If yours are rubber and old, replacing them with braided stainless is one of the cheapest risk reductions available to a homeowner.
Do the toilet dye test. A few drops of food colouring in the tank, do not flush, wait, then look in the bowl. Colour in the bowl means the flapper is leaking and water is running away continuously. Do this on every toilet, including the guest bathroom nobody uses.
Read your water meter with everything off. Close every tap, make sure no appliance is running, and look at the meter. If anything is moving, water is going somewhere. It is the most direct leak test there is.
Look under every sink. Cabinets, with a torch. You are looking for staining, warped particleboard, corrosion at the shutoff valves, or dampness. Slow leaks under sinks are common and they rot the cabinet base before anyone notices.
What a professional check covers
Supply lines and their condition, including material and any visible corrosion. This is where a repiping conversation starts, and it is better to start it early.
Shutoff valves throughout — main, fixtures, appliances. Valves seize, and a house where none of them turn is a house where every future repair is bigger than it needs to be.
Water pressure, measured. High pressure is invisible and it damages everything downstream continuously.
Water heater condition, age, and whether it is in a location where a failure would do damage.
Drains, how they run and whether any are slow — a slow drain is information about what is happening downstream.
Fixture condition and any leaks, including the ones under cabinets nobody looks in.
Appliance connections — dishwasher, washing machine, fridge water line. These are common failure points and they are behind appliances where nothing is visible.
Exposed pipe in crawlspaces, basements and garages, which is where freeze risk lives and where slow leaks go unnoticed longest.
Who this is most worth for
Anyone who has just bought a house, particularly if the inspection was general rather than plumbing-specific. Establishing what you actually have is worth doing in the first year rather than the fifth.
Older homes, where pipe material and age are real questions.
Anyone who has had one leak, because a leak is sometimes an event and sometimes the first of several, and knowing which matters.
Landlords and anyone with a suite, where you do not have daily visibility of the plumbing and a tenant may not report a slow problem.
Anyone going away for an extended period. Coming home to a house that has been leaking for three weeks is a specific and avoidable disaster. Shutting the water off when you leave for a long trip is free.
What it is not
It is not a sales visit. A useful check sometimes concludes that your plumbing is in good condition and you should do nothing — and that is a legitimate outcome that you have paid to know.
If a check produces a long list of urgent work on a house with no symptoms, that is worth a second opinion.
The general argument
Plumbing failures cause more property damage than almost anything else in a house, and they are the failures most amenable to being caught early. A slow leak found is a repair. The same leak found in two years is a floor.
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Related: Plumbing maintenance and repair · The signs of a hidden leak · How to tell if your home needs repiping
