How am I using 21,000 gallons of water a month?

[youbet]

Nice find T-Al. It looks like soup's meter has a "leak detector" as described in the pdf you posted. The red triangle?

 

[samclem]

Yes, the little red triangle rotates discernibly even with a very low flow of water (that's what it's there for). If you've got all the normal taps and stuff turned off, it shouldn't be turning.

 

[youbet]

Not to hijack the thread, but.......

While reading my combined water, sewer and garbage bill looking for hints on how to read the meter, I noticed some info which indicated that seniors over 65 receive a 50% discount on their garbage bill. DW recently turned 65! I'll have her over at town hall first thing Monday morning!

Sure glad I opened this thread. We've lived here for 35 years and I was unaware of that little detail.

Back to the potential water leak problem.......

 

[FreeAtLast]

I used about 6000 gallons last period for 2 people. I did not have the sprinklers on. I have them on a separate meter to avoid a sewer charge. I would shut off the sprinklers for a couple of days and check the meter before and after. Also you could watch the sprinklers and see if they are actually on for only 1 minute. I could be a problem with the sprinkler timer.

 

[donheff]

Just curious - what possible use can sprinkling for 1 minute be? Sounds like it would evaporate before any got absorbed.

 

[rescueme]

Ask your neighbor to disconnect his hose from your outside faucet ...

 

[KingB]

I also experienced some high water bill caused by:
1. Stuck cycle on the water softener. But this can be heard on the drain pipes.
2. Split hose(s) on the sprinkler. Noticeable only when the sprinkler is on.
3. Leak on toilet valve.

 

[jazz4cash]

Here is what my water meter looks like, except mine says 1" instead of 5/8" and it's much dirtier:

http://www.mupb.com/images/watermeter.jpg

So on the lower dial, in one hour with no water usage, it moved from 6.6 to 6.8, which I read as 0.2 gallons (I mistakenly said 0.1 gal in my original post). But even a leak of 0.2 gal/hr is only 150 gal in a month. I guess the red triangle rotates if you have a leak, I didn't notice that before.

I called the utility but they couldn't give me any kind of comparison to my neighborhood except to say that "normal" monthly usage is 5k gal per person plus whatever you use on the lawn. Is running the sprinklers for 1 minute per zone per week using 10,000 gallons a month?

I will turn the sprinklers off and start watching the meter every day.

Why is the meter moving with no water usage?
You stated this bill is not out of line with your other bills?
Did the upper dial that looks like an odometer change?
Is the meter located just before the line enters the house, or is it buried for some distance before entering the house?

With that level of resolution, I would get a garden hose with a nozzle on the end and a 5 gal bucket. I'd fill the bucket and watch the meter to compare a known volume of water dispensed vs. the meter measurement.

We dont have a sprinkler system, but our bill states average consumption is 70 gal/day/person. We use around 50/person/day.

 

[GrayHare]

another sneaky water loser: a leaky hot water tank sitting in a drain pan

 

[East Texas]

I live in Texas as well, but I have not watered my lawn since October. Why would you need to water your lawn until next month? Turn off your sprinkler system. Do not just put it on 1 minute per zone. When the system is off, the lowest possible time is zero.

Advice was not asked on whether or not to water. The question on the table is

How on earth do I explain the rest of the usage?

I'm betting on the sprinkler system. Back when I lived in the MegaCity I blew a diaphragm in one of the valves. That turned out to be a watery mess. I learned to check the valves once a week to see if they were leaking.

You could have a broken extension under one of your sprinkler heads. See if any of them wiggle. Walk the sprinkler line (the underground pipe that carries water to the sprinkler heads) and see if there's a mushy area (may require being barefoot). I'd also walk the low points in your yard and ask the neighbors if they've had any unexplained wet spots.

My biggest headache was the sprinkler head that was right in the corner of the driveway and sidewalk. I even put a concrete donut around it so when cars went over it I wouldn't always be the local water company's cash cow. I finally dug down about 8" in the ground and capped that sucker off.

 

[Rustward]

Just another data point for you: Two people here who are pretty conservative with H2O usage: Our usage from November to February varied from a low of 4700 gallons per month to a high of 5800 gallons per month. About three loads of laundry per week (maybe an average -- Oh! there's that "average" word again), dishwasher about once a week (sink the rest of the time). We do bathe or shower daily or more often.

The other months we use a lot more water because we are watering almost an acre of grass and other vegges and a small (6'x9') pond.

Edit to add: In the summers we can hit 50,000 or 60,000 gallons per month, (note I did not use the "average" word in this sentence) and for various reasons we have been encouraged to conserve, which we have done and intend continue to do going forward.

Edited again to add: I know that sometimes our water usage is estimated (or extrapolated, "hey, whetever") so the numbers might not be completely accurate, but that is what has been on the water bill.

 

[ratto]

I watched the meter for an hour last night when no one was in the house and it moved 0.1 gallons in an hour with no water usage. So that leak is only 0.1*24*30 = 72 gallons per month. Neither of us takes baths or uses the tubs (shower only).

Since no one has mentioned this possibility yet, allow me to chime in.

soupcxan, are you sure your water meter reading is gallon based, not cubic meter (ton) based instead? 1 cubic meter water is 1 metric ton, or 1000 liters (that's the beauty of metric system; easy to count, measure and calculate). 1 US gallon is 3.6 liters. So 0.1*24*30 = 72 tons = 72000 liters = 20000 US gallons/month, very close to your 21000 figure for Feb. If this IS the case, then good news stays and bad news refuses to leave. The good news is that you and your DW have been very conscientious in water conservation. The bad news is that there is at lease one leak after your water meter main somewhere on your property, very badly.

 

[easysurfer]

How about previous bills? How much usage do they show? It won't spot where the leaks are, but at least when the large amount of usage started.

 

[FreeAtLast]

Ask your neighbor to disconnect his hose from your outside faucet ...

This is a possibility. My sister recently had a sewer problem and when they traced the problem the plumber was digging in the middle of the neighbor's yard. Her outgoing sewer line was tied into the neighbbor's line.

Someone clearly took some kind of short cut when the homes were built as my sister had to pay to have her own connection made to city sewer.

I guess the same thing could happen with the water source.

 

[NW-Bound]

This thread made me curious, so I went out to look at my meter. On the dial face was a big legend that said "Cubic Foot", and 1 cu.ft. = 7.48 gal.

I turned on the garden hose and watched. The needle appeared to make one revolution per cu.ft. The dial read-out appeared to have the resolution of 1 cu.ft. That's a bit better resolution than T-Al's meter, whose needle revolution is 10 gals.

I went inside to look at my wife's file for utility bills. In July of 2011, we used 23,000 gal. Egads! That of course included the watering to save the plants from the "dry heat". The total bill was $188, and that included sewer and garbage collection. The bill said that a billing unit is 100 cu.ft or 748 gals. That agreed with the meter dial, which shows that first 2 digits as black, and the 3rd and higher digits as white.

 

[Nodak]

I know some places don't always read every meter every month. When this happens, they tend to "estimate" based on past usage habits. It doesn't seem like this would cause such a sudden spike if usage hasn't been unusually high lately, but if they underestimate when they don't read the meter, it could lead to a larger adjustment later when they do read it. Obviously I don't know if this is the case but it is one potential source for "sticker shock" on utility bills.

+1
I rented a house in Minneapolis that had been empty a few months. For the first few months the water bills were what I thought should be normal then suddenly I got one that was about 10 times the previous ones. I contacted the municipal people and found out they had been estimating water usage for almost two years then finally got around to actually reading the meter.

 

[FANOFJESUS]

This is a possibility. My sister recently had a sewer problem and when they traced the problem the plumber was digging in the middle of the neighbor's yard. Her outgoing sewer line was tied into the neighbbor's line.

Someone clearly took some kind of short cut when the homes were built as my sister had to pay to have her own connection made to city sewer.

I guess the same thing could happen with the water source.

I have seen this done in the inter city with a garden hose. Run a garden hose from the house with water to the house with no water. I don't know how long it works but it would work unless the hose busted. The hose runs from nip to nip.

 

[sheehs1]

The one and only time this happened to us we had a leaky toilet. The reading was up in the 20,000 range too. The one that was leaking was upstairs and with the children gone, we rarely went up there.

Suggest calling the company that bills you and ask what your usage was last year for the same time frame and to ask what your average use has been the last 6 months...etc.

A leaky toilet can waste a LOT of water. By leaky, I mean "running" continuously.
Hope you find the source!

 

[East Texas]

Ah, food color in the toilet tank - brings back (un)fond memories. We finally traced a water leak just listening to the shared wall between the bedroom and the bathroom. The sinks, hence water lines, were against the wall. Cut a hole in the sheetrock on the bedroom side and there it was. The slight spewing sound was the clue...

I lived in the MegaCity house for almost 20 years. I had a full house inspection done before I put it up for sale and was told the water pressure was too high - that's why the diaphragms were blowing in the sprinkler system and the weak spot in the copper piping in the wall finally failed.

I'm assuming you've checked for damp spots under all sinks and along baseboards in shared walls between kitchen / bathroom / and other (shared wall) rooms.

 

[Telly]

Typical NTX water meter is in a box below grade near the street. Everything after the output of the meter is the customers responsibility, including the connection to the meter output. Sprinkler system tee's into the tubing running up to the house, usually close to the meter. The sprinkler main valve box is usually mounted close to the meter box. The sprinkler main valve box has a double backflow-preventer valve in it, with an isolation shut-off valve ahead and behind it. The output of the sprinkler box is a main pressure pipe that feeds all of the individual sector valves, which are spread out to be near the each sector's sprinkler heads that they feed, for best distribution.

The orange triangle on the meter face is a "tell tale", and is very sensitive. So sensitive that it can spin forwards or backwards some with just pressure surges in the city piping system, without water being used by the house.

With all the rain we had earlier this week, the surface has dried off now. If the area around the meter or sprinkler box is soaking wet, and the rest of the area is not, that may be a leak. But I would sure expect it to show on the meter.

A toilet flapper chain that gets wrapped/bound up can keep the fill valve filling away, but it would take days of running away like that per month to get the ~5-6k gallons per month I would expect with your situation up to the 21k per month.

I do not run our sprinkler system at all in the winter, except in a very dry winter, then I may run it just a few times set manually to run for a cycle.

If a review of last winters bills shows the same usage rate as this past winter, then I think it's time to try the 5 gal. drywall bucket meter test. I would try it anyway.

I am surprised that you have a 1" meter, especially on such a tiny lot. Standard for most houses around here were 5/8" years ago, 3/4" on newer construction. And that is with most every house having a (landscape)sprinkler system. To see a 1" or larger meter would be a big house with a FIRE sprinkler system!
Many cities set their base monthly charge by meter size. Bigger meter, higher base charge, even if you use 0 gallons of water.

 

[ERD50]

I'm on a well so no water meter. I did have a leak a few years back, underground, outside, at the junction of the well and the supply pipe. I didn't know we had a leak until I started getting suspicious about the wet spot there (it was late winter/spring, so that's typical with snow melt and rain), and at the same time, the water pressure was dropping. The leak had got so bad the well pump couldn't keep up. I guess I caught it early enough though, my electric bill was higher that month, but nothing too out of the ordinary.

Anyway, this thread inspired me to finally do what I had thought of for a long time - tap off the 220V switched to the well pump, use a high value resistor (~100K) on each leg for safety and to drop the current down to 'sensor' levels. Put a rectifier diode in series with that, then a couple diodes or an LED, paralleled with a bleed-down resistor (~2.2M) and a small cap (0.1uF) to somewhat regulate this to ~ 1.4V. Then, I'll connect an old, cheap analog quartz clock to this (the kind with mechanical hands that run on a AA battery). The clock will then log the hours that the pump has run. Should normally only be around 2 hours a day, probably less, so pretty easy to set to 12:00 and log close to a week w/o resetting. I should actually be able to get a pretty good idea how much water my water softener is using.

-ERD50

 

[REWahoo]

I should actually be able to get a pretty good idea how much water my water softener is using.

Wouldn't it be considerably easier to look up the specs of your softener and see what what it tells you about how much water is used when it regens? Mine says 42 gals...

 

[ERD50]

Wouldn't it be considerably easier to look up the specs of your softener and see what what it tells you about how much water is used when it regens? Mine says 42 gals...

If it is running properly, but if it isn't? Anyway, that would just be a side benefit of being able to monitor how much my pump is running, which is the main goal.

-ERD50

 

[soupcxan]

The utility dept confirmed that my bill was for 21,000 gallons. And that amount is not out of line with previous bills - I just never noticed before because the bill just says "usage: 21" with no units of measure. You would think with all the water restrictions we have had from the drought they would make it obvious how much water you're using! Also the water bill is measured on actual usage, not an average. And frankly even with this much usage the $ impact is still pretty minimal, which is why I ignored it until now. However the sewage charge is based on water usage, so I'm getting charged again there too if my water usage is excessive.

The difference in base cost between a 1" hookup and a 5/8" or 3/4" hookup is only $2/month, so clearly not worth the cost of replacing it. Our house does not have a fire sprinkler system.

The little red triangle on our meter isn't rotating at a perceptible speed, so I don't think there's a chronic leak.

Actual daily usage was 60 gal for the first day, and 220 for the second day (though that included 4 loads of wash). Even if I used 220/day for a month that'd still be less than 8k gallons. The sprinklers haven't run so that must be the culprit. I now suspect we have had an underground leak in the system for quite some time. Sheesh.

 

[Nords]

The little red triangle on our meter isn't rotating at a perceptible speed, so I don't think there's a chronic leak.
I now suspect we have had an underground leak in the system for quite some time. Sheesh.

If you had an underground leak in the system then you'd expect the little red triangle to be moving.

If it only leaked when the sprinklers were running then you'd expect some part of the yard to be really really green. I found a sprinkler leak when one of our papaya trees suddenly went into overdrive.