Leak Repair

A leak on a line you can’t shut down is an awkward problem. The outage costs more than the leak does, and the leak won’t wait for the next planned shutdown. We seal leaks on pipes that stay in service, using clamps, resins, tapes and, where the pipe suits it, a live weld.

Australian Hot Taps has been working on pressurised pipelines since 1996. Clamps for many common pipes are held in stock, and where nothing off the shelf fits the geometry we manufacture the fitting for your pipe instead.

Call 1800 468 827 with your pipe size, material and what’s in the line, and we’ll tell you whether the leak can be sealed live.

Can you repair a pipe leak under pressure?

Most of the time, yes. The repair goes on over the leak while the product keeps flowing, so the system doesn’t come down and there’s no drain down and recommissioning to organise afterwards.

What it takes depends on where the leak is. A weeping flange is a different job from a pinhole in a wall that’s corroded from the inside, and a split along a welded seam is different again. Describe what you’ve got and we’ll tell you what we would fit to it.

Once the repair is on, the leak stops almost instantly.

What is on-line leak sealing?

It’s the industry name for sealing a leak without taking the line out of service. Live leak sealing and leak repair under pressure are the same work under different names.

The products change with the leak. We use epoxy resins, fibreglass tapes coated with polyurethane resin and high performance silicone tapes, as well as mechanical clamps. Quite often we manufacture a custom designed product to seal one particular leak, so whether it’s on an elbow, a tee, a flange or a straight piece of pipe, there’s usually something that can be applied under pressure.

Can you weld on a live gas line?

Live weld repairs are part of what we do, and on gas we’ve been accredited for it since 1998, when the Office of Gas Safety, now Energy Safe Victoria, accredited Australian Hot Taps as the first company permitted to hot tap and stop off live gas lines. Our welders are accredited for butt weld, fillet weld and socket weld transmission gas welding procedures.

A live weld only works where the wall can take it. Every pipeline gets ultrasonic NDT wall thickness testing before we weld on it, and if it’s too thin to weld on we’ll tell you before we start and fit a clamp or a wrap instead.

The same welding is what puts a new connection into a live line rather than repairing one, which is how a hot tap is made.

What pipes and contents can be sealed?

Almost all pipeline material types, with just about any liquid or gas inside them. We work on gas, water, steam, chemical and process lines, and the products we deal with run from natural gas and potable water to chilled water, compressed air and petrochemicals.

These repairs operate across a temperature range of -60°C to 200°C, at pressures up to 2,700kPa.

Stopping a leak isn’t the only reason people ring about this. We also remediate and reinforce existing pipelines with thinning walls, and the same materials will give you a corrosion barrier and isolation, or abrasion protection on a section that’s taking a beating.

Can you find the leak as well as seal it?

If you know the line is losing pressure but you can’t work out where from, that’s a pressure testing job before it’s a repair job. We can test at high or low pressure and help locate it. The equipment and the method are set out on our pressure testing and purging page.

What helps us quote it

For a leak, a photo tells us more than a description does. Anything else you have helps:

• Pipe size and material
• Wall thickness, if you know it
• What’s in the line, and at what pressure and temperature
• Where the leak is. A flange, a weld, a threaded joint, a bend, or somewhere in a straight run
• Whether the pressure can be reduced at all, or has to stay where it is
• How you get to the pipe. Above ground, in a riser, or buried and needing an excavation
• Photos of the leak and the pipe around it. These tell us more than anything else on the list

Call 1800 468 827 or email [email protected]. If you’re not sure whether your leak can be sealed under pressure, just give us a call, we’ll ask a few questions and let you know.

Where we work

We operate from depots in Bayswater, Victoria and Currumbin Waters, Queensland, and we have clients in all states and territories of Australia as well as the Pacific Islands and New Zealand. We regularly fly in and out to service our clients.

Leak repair is one of ten live pipeline services we provide. Where a seal isn’t the right answer and the damaged section has to come out, we can hold the line back while it’s replaced. Usually that means inserting a plug through a fitting. Where there’s nowhere to weld a fitting on, we form an ice plug with liquid nitrogen instead, and when neither of those is practical or cost effective the answer can be to squash the pipe closed. We also cut new valves into live water mains, install thermowells and instrument pockets under pressure, and take on gas reticulation, sizing and fabrication work.

What a live leak repair involves