So I'm conserving like crazy and what do I get? A water bill for $1800. What?!! According to this I used 7300 gallons of water from February through April. Last year I only used 116. I for form letter saying I should look for hidden leaks. Are they kidding? 7300 gallon is like what? A swimming pool? I think I would have noticed a pond of water in the alley, the street or my back yard. That much water doesn't just soak into the ground around here. We have clay right below the topsoil. It sits. So unless I've got an underground sinkhole the meter reader is full of sh¡t. Now the billing lady in the water department crossed through my bill and they are sending another reader out in a few weeks to read the meter again. Maybe it was read incorrectly. Ya think? So, how much *IS* 6,000 cubic feet of water? Is that a small swimming pool? An olympic swimming pool? Is my house going to sink into a sinkhole hallowed out underground by this "hidden leak"?
Got a garden w/ sprinklers? If yes, and the meter reading was correctly read, some sprinklers might be broken. It has happened to me a couple of times in the past. Imagine a 10ft deep, 20ft wide, 30ft long swimming pool. That is 6000 cu ft of water.
That's per day. Your typical 15' x 30' swimming pool is about 15,000 gallons. A cubic foot of water is around 7.5 gallons, so 6000 cubic feet is about three 15x30 swimming pools. A thousand gallons per day is not unheard of for an underground water leak. I knew someone who had a leak in their underground irrigation PVC pipe (pressurized section) and it leaked a thousand gallons a day. One square foot of turf in a desert climate takes about 100 gallons of water a year to maintain. So 2000 square feet of lawn takes 200,000 gallons of water, or around 1000 gallons a day in the summer months.
I know it's ironic that water in the desert is cheap but I probably wouldn't see that amount of additional water on my bill here in Arizona. I know last year when I drained/filled my pool I wouldn't be surprised if my bill only went up $20 and that's for a 25k gallon pool.
A thousand gallons a day for a leak yeah. Over seven thousand gallons a day completely undetected? No soggy earth? No sinkhole? No dampness or puddles? There's a layer of clay down there. So that water would be following the clay and probably forming a lake on the sidewalk in front of the house. Not happening. Or it could form a little lake in the alley because it can't run off or sink in fast enough. Not happening either. 116 gallons per day last year. 7,299 gallons per day this year? No way. SEVEN THOUSAND? I don't have a pool or a lawn. The water pipes aren't that deep. They were completely replaced from the meter to the house a few years ago. And I have all new pipes in the house too. I didn't turn on the drip timers until last week. That was AFTER the meter was read. If there was any leak like this I would have seen it. I had a water leak a few months after I bought the house in 1987. I had a swamp puddle in the middle of the yard that never went away. Nothing like that now. There is simply no way anything is leaking. No faucets. The toilet isn't running. Unless someone is tapping into my line I just don't see it. We'll see what the new reading says. I still think it's a mistake. There is no place for that amount of water to go in that space of time completely undetected. Three swimming pools in three months? I don't think so.
I have heard that when a water meter starts to go it runs faster - not slower. If the reading is correct, ask that it be replaced.
Right before the guy at work discovered his thousand gallon per day leak he commented to me that he couldn't believe how good this tree in his front yard was looking . My guess is you are correct and it's a meter reading error. Do you know if you have a remote meter reader - the kind where instead of having to take the cover off and look at the dial, they are able to read the meter via RF from a few feet away with the cover still on? I could easily see one of those devices going whacko and giving an erroneous reading. You might want to take a look at your meter and make sure that little spinning triangle indicator is really stopped when all your water is shut off.
It's too cheap when some jackasses in Las Vegas average 8-10k gallons of water per day every day of the year just because they can afford it. Las Vegas Mercury: <b>Cover Story: Top 100 residential water users</... Lake Mead will go dry before these a**holes get a clue. BTW, the top user, "99 Spanish Gate", is the compound of Prince Jefri, brother of the Sultan of Brunei. That is one f'd up family. The Fairy Tale's Over for the Kindom of Brunei Forget anything you've read about the Sultan, his spendthrift brother, and those missing billions. If you don't, you'll never wrap your mind around the real story.... - February 1, 1999 "It may be true, as the saying goes, that absolute power corrupts absolutely. But throw absolute wealth--plus an unhealthy measure of inbreeding--into the mix, and the depravity gets downright entertaining. Officially Brunei is known as the "Abode of Peace." But insiders know it's not about peace. It's about oil--and money--flowing through the hands of a family so unhinged that they seem utterly incapable of managing it."
I hear you. I don't have that much vegetation in the planter beds, but if there was a leak like that I'd be living in a soggy jungle. I know exactly where all of the pipes run. I wasn't aware the meters start to run fast when they start to go. This one is decades old. It was old when I moved in in 1987. But it's basically a mechanical thing. I don't see how the meter itself can be wrong. It must have been read wrong. They are going to replace the meters with remote reader ones but haven't yet. They have to take the cover off to read it. They're eventually going to replace the gas and electrical meters with remote readers too but that's a long process that won't start until next year. I think I would have noticed 7,000 gallons a day. It has to go somewhere.
Back when I worked in industry, one of the engineers that worked for me lived on a hill in an area where they were having water shortages. The water shortage got so bad that the water drained backward out of his house, sucking air through the water meter. When the water came back up, the air pressure spun the meter like a turbine, racking up a huge number of cubic feet in a very short time. This cycle repeated itself many times before the water shortage was resolved. When his water bill arrived he nearly had a heart attack. We calculated that he would have had to flood most of his city to a level of several feet to use that much water. It took a lot of arguing to cut through the bureaucracy, but eventually his bill was adjusted. As an interesting aside, where I now live we measure water in cubic miles. The nominal volume of the Great Lakes is 5474 cubic miles of fresh water. That's enough to cover the contiguous 48 states in over six feet of water. Tom
How much GRAY water would it take to water the same lawn? Since I'm studying for LEED AP, I'm growing more and more convinced that there's a lot of perfectly good municipal water being used for many uses in which gray water would be perfectly acceptable. First I want to buy a house, then I want to install a water collection and reuse system.
So, if they were working on the pipes and air got in the system, would it possibly do this? And....wouldn't the same anomaly show up on all of the meters in the area?
I know what it is. Sloppy, lazy meter reader. I went out today to look at my meter to see if it was running like crazy with the water off. Nope. It was stone, solid frozen. No water running through it like it would need to register 7,000 gallons a day. So I took pictures of the dirt on the cover (like it hadn't been removed in months) And I took pictures of the dial inside so encrusted with dirt there is no way anyone could read it. I brushed it off and it was still so dirty even a spit-licked finger couldn't clear it. So I got soap and a rag and cleaned it off. I took more pictures, wrote down the numbers and came inside to look at my bill. The bill said previous reading was 1361 and current reading was 1966. Well the current reading is 1367. So their reading was 1366. Lazy-nice person slacker moron meter reader. They are so going to amend this bill. I used LESS water this year than I did in the same billing cycle last year. Last year I used 9 HCF. This year only 5 HCF. Ba$turds!
If anything like the lazy sloppy unionized meter readers around here, that person won't get fired either. A few years ago I got into the habit of reading the meter myself and calling it in on the billing cycle date. You'd be surprised - perhaps not after what you just went through - the meter reader was wrong 80% of the time. The house I sold 6 years ago was the worst, must have been a dyslexic meter reader. The gas meter was a refurbished one, has dials you have to figure out. But the electric meter was an LCD display, and the water meter had digits too The water meters are sort of remotely read. There is a sensor outside the house, the reader presses the gadget up to it and it captures the reading. The electric and gas are marked down I had a power bill of $300 for a house with gas heat. So I checked what they had marked down, went outside, and they had transposed a couple of digits. You bet I called a supervisor Let's face it, nobody gives a s*** anymore about their job performance. It's just a paycheck, so they do as little as possible.
Call me elitist, condescending and any other insulting names you wish....but if they were college graduates they wouldn't be reading meters.
Backflow is why most municipalities require check valves for new installations. My old system never had one, being put in too long ago, and the new water heater caused some interesting symptoms when the pumphouse down the road started flushing its filters. Part 2 describes the fix, although enough pressure on my side could still cause reverse flow. . I agree about greywater, and last time I was tooling around some subdivision construction sites in FL I noticed a lot of "purple pipes" running to foundation slabs along with the usual in and out -- apparently this is a neighborhood-wide greywater system, which seems very cool but I didn't get that much more info on it. . _H*
For your own peace of mind, you read your own meter on the first day of each month. You should have double water meters - for both potable (fresh) and used. Read both meters and compare the differences. If the used is less than potable, then there is a leak or unknown drain inbetween. Check every valve around the house. Replace washers. Conservation and efficiency is always more cost effective than getting new. Invite the utility to help you do a water and energy audit. And, or, teach the utility how to read their own meters (may take 12 months of readings). Plublicize what you have done, but remain objective and professional. Keep simple, detailed records on a spreadsheet ready to print at a moments notice. When was the potable water meter installed (may be old, and, or, defective) or last calibrated? Ask a comparable neighbor if you can read their meter(s) each month for a control.
H Geez, your adventures never cease to amaze me. The Marathon is considered one of the best conventional tank water heaters out there. Especially in areas of hard alkaline water, like most of Saskatchewan and western Manitoba, they are the only heater that will last more than 5 years. In Canada, water heater and appliance warranties are much lower in Saskatchewan, just due to the ick water. Supposedly you can still drink it One tip I can offer is to put in a water softener PRONTO. What happened to your old tank was caused by the hard water. Your new tank is immune to that sort of corrosion, though for sanitary reasons I would recommend a flush job at *least* once a month The same deposits are probably in your washing machine and dishwasher. Dishwashers on hard water often have problems with the little fill valve, as sediment and scale plugs the diaphragm vent hole If you chose a water softener, make sure to put a sediment filter on. The resin bed will quickly cake up with dirty well water, and it sounds like your municipal water is dirty due to that flushing they perform Also, if you put in a water softener, use the salt that has citric acid in it. It will keep the resin bed cleaner and will take care of minor rust issues. Here in Canada it's called Windsor Super Pellets, in the US it's sold by Morton Morton¨Salt - when it rains it pours¨ Overall, good job. Hopefully you walked away with your sanity mostly intact. If you *really* want a fun DIY project, try to diagnose a plugged sewer line jay
Air got into the system through open valves in his house, and air vented the same way. Normally you only have a small amount of air to purge, but his house was at the high point in his area, so it went high and dry. Everyone knew about the water problem, but bureaucracies can be pretty pig headed. Tom
