water bill craziness
Just wondering if anyone has any advice about our situation: We’ve owned our Sunset Park limestone for five and a half years, and have consistently used in the range of 1800-2200 cubic feet of water (about $100) per quarter, with an occasional spike to 3000 or so. Last summer, however, we suddenly got a bill…
Just wondering if anyone has any advice about our situation:
We’ve owned our Sunset Park limestone for five and a half years, and have consistently used in the range of 1800-2200 cubic feet of water (about $100) per quarter, with an occasional spike to 3000 or so. Last summer, however, we suddenly got a bill for 5400 cf ($250). then in the October bill, we got billed for 36,000 cf ($1800)!!
We had the DEP send someone out to look at the meter and inspect the house, and he was seriously the dumbest person I’ve met in a really long time, but he did find a silent internal leak in one toilet. I’m willing to believe that the summer’s high bill was caused by that leak + watering the garden or whatever, but there’s no way it accounts for the 36,000 cf bill.
The proof for this is that we fixed the toilet when he was here, in the middle of the next billing period, and our latest bill was slightly high (3500 cf, $180), reflecting the extra usage in the first half of the quarter. Not anywhere close to explaining the 36,000 cf.
To give you an idea of how much 36,000 cf is, I did a little calculation: if we made our entire 45 x 20 backyard into a 6-foot-deep swimming pool, we could have filled it 6.66 times with that much water. It’s simply impossible.
we’ve also had the free water usage survey the DEP offers: no leaks. And all the meter readings are actual, not estimated.
We are appealing this bill, but I just don’t have any way to explain what happened. Has anyone had a situation anything like this?
thanks.
You may want to check the archives. I think I read at some point that someone had a problem with their (old) meter, somehow it went berzek as they were using too much water for the size of their water main. They replaced the meter and they had the problem fixed. My memory is sketchy – you may want to read through the archives.
TT here:
Actually, the “water just running straight down the tube” was exactly our prolbem. In our case, it was audible. Anyway the plumber told me the fill level is often set too high at the factory.
I just looked again at our water bills. The sewer charge is consistently 60% of the total bill. (So our 1400 bill was $544 water, $863 sewer.) For one thing, that means it costs more to put waste out than fresh water in. (Go figure.) But, it also seems to mean that if that ratio is consistent, the extra water coming in is also going down the drain, not into the walls–right?
If we got water bills monthly (instead of quarterly) one could catch problems sooner. After all, Con Ed now reads the water meter, as well as gas and electric every month. I suppose that would mean extra administrative work for DEP, but it could save lots water in the long run.
thanks for the comments. I do have a watering system, but it’s drip irrigation, and was shut off by the time in question.
The toilet leak–the only thing the DEP found–was not a running toilet (I’m highly aware of that) but an internal leak, where the float was set wrong, so water was just running straight down the tube–silently. I had no idea it could do that! Anyway, as I said, that toilet leak couldn’t have explained the water bill, since it wasn’t fixed until half way through the next billing period, which was high, but what I’d call normal-high.
There’s no way the meter can malfunction?
This quarter our water bill was $1400, it’s normally about $200. On the bill it showed the daily average at 2100 gal/day. I freaked out. I went to the cellar, the dial on the water meter was spinning around full-speed. Listening to the main waste line, I could hear running water. I soon discovered our tenant’s toilet was running. When I called her at work to ask her about it, she said: “I didn’t know a running toilet would use that much water, it’s been running a lot, I’m sorry!” Then, I discovered that my upper-west-side-apt-reared husband didn’t know what a running toilet was, (!!!) he said the toilet on the top floor (where he has his home office) runs quite often.
I called my friend, a master plumber to ask him if it was possible that these two toilets could use that much water. He said “do the math. Let’s say, for instance that the tank holds 2 gallons, if the toilet runs all day at, say 2 gal/minute, that would be 2,880 gal/day.” It took me no more than 5 minutes to fix the fill-level on both low-volume-flush toilets. Lucky for us, the problem seemed easy to find and–hopefully–it’s solved.
I grew up in the suburbs where my father freaked out anytime someone let the toilet run. I also asked my plumber-friend, who owns several buildings, if he ever heard of people who didn’t know a running toilet wastes water: “yes. Just recently a tenant said he never said anything about his toilet running because he didn’t want to bother me. Which is ridiculous since I’m a plumber.”
Ah, the joys of homeownership . . .
TT
A good way to test for leaks in a private residence is to shut off your water main at night before you go to bed.
Don’t turn any water on.
In the morning, turn it back on and see if the system fills (watch the meter dial). If it does, the piping has lost pressure somewhere, indicating a leak.
If it’s through a running toilet, you’ll hear that toilet refilling.
This only works if you’ve got a good and reliable shut off valve.
The one that’s been there since 1940 is not reliable. Don’t touch it.
Use the new ones that came with the meter.
I recently bought a house that has a fancy watering system in place. At closing I learned of the ridiculously high water bills they were getting, and I suspected a leak.
It turned out the reason was the watering system: after i turned if off, my bills decreased by more than a thousand dollars! My garden is not that big, and never looked over-watered but it was obviously receiving thousands of cf without anyone noticing…
It may not be your case, just but so that you know.