No More Blind Hunts: Bird Dog Leak Detector Leads You Straight to the Leak

If you’ve ever chased a leak that “shouldn’t” exist, you know small problems can become big headaches. That’s why we make Bird Dog Leak Detector in two formulas—Regular and Low-Temp. Both create fast, tight bubbles that point to leaks you can’t see or hear. Low-Temp is built for cold weather and cold systems, so it keeps working when other products don’t.

The email that started it:

A customer sent photos: damp cartons and residue on aerosol cans in their warehouse. They suspected seam failures and wanted confirmation before this turned into a broader issue. We requested samples to investigate and let them know we’d involve the can supplier for definitive testing.

For context: we buy around 50,000+ aerosol cans at a time (a full truckload). When we run this product in particular, we run batches of 3,600–6,000 cans and there is 1,200 cans per completed pallet. From that production lot, product was shipped all over the country and we still had inventory sitting in our own warehouse. Only one pallet showed leaking issues. 

We sent cans to the supplier for a full evaluation:

• Pressurized and submerged the cans in a water bath to watch for bubbles.
• Cut open units to inspect for internal corrosion or trace leak paths.
• Put the bottom seam under a microscope and documented the seam profile.

Result: no leaks detected, no internal corrosion, no visible seam defects. On paper, everything was perfect. Because if the lab didn’t find it, it must not exist… right?

The problem didn’t go away

The customer wasn’t imagining things. A couple week later we asked them to ship back more cans, they shipped back about 50 more cans they believed were leaking at the bottom seam. This time, we ran an extended in-house evaluation designed to catch what submersion tests and microscope snapshots couldn’t find.

Our in-house evaluation

• We cleaned, dried, and weighed each can.
• We placed them upright on clean white paper, undisturbed, overnight at ~74°F.
• We rechecked the paper and weight after roughly 14 hours.

What we saw: faint wet rings under a subset of units. What we measured: weight losses ranging from about 0.03 grams up to around 1.0 grams in 14 hours. That’s tiny—but real. A micro-leak was present. Now we needed the exact point of failure.

Bird Dog Leak Detector goes to work

We reached for our Bird Dog Leak Detector. We brushed a thin, even film around the suspect seam area and watched. Within seconds, tiny, sustained bubbles formed along a specific stretch of the seam—repeatable, photographable proof of a leak that immersion testing and pressure testing had missed. Orientation and surface tension matter with micro-leaks; what doesn’t show in a bath can reveal itself immediately when a proven bubble-forming detector is applied with the can in a real-world position.

How small is “micro”? Here’s the reality check
Each can carries a net weight of 510 grams and is labeled 20 fl oz (≈591.5 mL). At room temperature, that corresponds to an average density of roughly 0.86 g/mL.

From our overnight checks:

• 0.03 g in 14 hours ≈ 0.0514 g/day. At that rate, emptying 510 g would take roughly 9,923 days (~27 years).
• 0.5 g in 14 hours would be roughly 1,000 days to empty 510 g: 1,020 days (~2.8 years).
• Translation: less than a drop roughly every 12 hours. You’re not going to hear it and you probably won’t see it….unless you used Bird Dog.