How do you protect your home from water damage?

Escape of water is the industry term for water that gets out of the pipes, appliances or fittings inside a home. It is not a rare event. When Go.Compare looked at what its home insurance customers declared through 2024, escape of water came out top of the list, ahead of accidental damage and well ahead of storms.

The industry-level figure says the same thing in pounds. The Association of British Insurers puts what insurers pay out for water damage at £1.8 million a day.

A burst pipe announces itself. You hear it, you see it, and you turn the water off at the stopcock. The expensive version is quieter: a joint that weeps a few drops an hour inside a wall or under a floor, running for weeks before anything appears on the surface.

That delay is what turns a small repair into a large one. Plaster, timber and chipboard tolerate damp for a while, and every week the water travels further into them. What could have been fixed by replacing one fitting becomes a job that takes out flooring, skirting and part of a wall.

The most common silent leak is one nobody thinks of as a leak at all. Waterwise estimates that one in twenty toilets in the UK runs water into the pan continuously, month after month, without making a sound.

The usual protection in a UK home is a battery water alarm: a small puck you put on the floor under the sink or behind the washing machine. For the job it was built for, it works. If the machine overflows, you know within seconds.

But it only reacts to water that has already escaped, and only if that water reaches the exact spot where the puck is sitting. A leak inside a wall, under a floor or into a toilet pan never gets there, so the alarm never sounds.

It is the gap you would have in fire safety if the smoke alarm only covered one corner of one room.

If the problem is that a leak can run unseen for weeks, the answer has to be something that changes from the first drop. In plumbing, that something is the flow of water in the pipe.

Water moving through the house at three in the morning, with every tap closed, is not normal use. That signal is in the incoming pipe wherever the leak sits, whatever is leaking, and whether or not anyone is home to notice.

Water Grip clamps onto the outside of the incoming water pipe and measures the flow with ultrasound around the clock. Nothing is cut, drained or soldered. When the pattern does not add up, for example when water runs steadily for hours with no tap open, you get an alert in the app.

It reads temperature at the same time, so it also warns you when a pipe is getting cold enough to be at risk of freezing.

Water Grip was developed with Länsförsäkringar, one of Sweden's largest insurance groups, and we have worked with their claims prevention arm since 2022. They see water damage after the fact, and that experience shaped what the product looks for.