Water in the gutter on a dry day started somewhere uphill.
The water main is the one pipe that owns you back. It's the line running from the meter at the street to your house, it's yours to maintain even though you've never seen it, and when it fails, it fails with a signature. A wet patch in the yard that never dries. A meter spinning with every fixture off. Pressure that dropped house wide all at once. A water bill that jumped a category. Sometimes the street itself tells you, water seeping up through the parkway or the driveway seam, the main announcing itself the only way a buried pipe can.
What failed and where determines everything, and both are findable without digging up the yard to ask. The line gets traced and the failure located precisely, a split at a fitting, a section crushed by a root or settling, a corroded stretch finally through, and the fix gets scoped to the finding. Sometimes it's a targeted repair at the marked spot, one clean excavation instead of a trench safari. Sometimes, with older galvanized or a line that's failed before, the honest conversation is replacement, and modern methods matter here, trenchless approaches can pull a new line through with entry and exit points instead of an open trench across everything you've planted.
The one thing a failing main never does is improve, the leak runs on your meter around the calendar, the saturated ground works on whatever sits above it, and the pressure sags until the failure finishes. The response here runs in order, locate precisely, explain plainly, fix what the evidence shows, with a licensed contractor performing the work and every option laid out in plain English first. Your line, your yard, your decision. The main carried the house this long. One honest repair carries it the rest of the way.
"Dry week, wet gutter. Somebody's service line is talking."
