How to run up a huge water bill

For the last few months, I've suspected that we've had a pretty bad water leak at our home. There was never any sign of water damage, but our water bills were much higher than usual, starting around July. However, it it took the December water bill, which was the first without any lawn watering activity on it, to verify that our usage seemed way out of whack--over 1,500 gallons a day per month, based on the last bill. Yikes! Typical usage for a family such as ours should probably be down in the 300 to 500 gallon range, if not lower.

So last week, I had a number of service folks at the house. First a plumber, who repaired a couple of slightly leaky toilets. However, he told me they wouldn't account for the amount of water we were seeing flowing into the home when there was no water-using device in use. So he suspected there was a problem in the line between the street and the house. But he couldn't find the shut-off valve at the house that every home here must have, and neither could I--I know I've never seen it.

So then it was time for a leak detection service. This guy showed up with a simple device--a metal rod connected to a pair of headphones. In only a couple minutes, he narrowed in on the source of the leak and found it. It turns out it was the shut-off valve itself that was the problem: the casing had cracked, and it was spitting out maybe a gallon of water every couple of minutes...or at least 720 gallons a day!

We hadn't ever seen this valve, because its cover was buried under two feet of topsoil. We couldn't hear the leak, either, because the valve itself is another three feet down in a cement-lined tube. The good news is that the water was simply re-entering the ground supply, not flowing out to the street, or down into our crawl space, foundation, etc. I shot a poorly lit, confusing movie (10MB) of the leak in action. You're looking down into the three foot hole, and you can't really see the valve. But you can hear and see the amount of water spraying out.

With the leak found, the plumber returned to fix it, which required digging a large hole to reach the deeply-buried valve. Many hours later, things were all better, and our "passive" water usage had returned to zero (and we should be able to get a credit from the water department for unused sewer charges, since the water wasn't flowing into the sewers.)

This was an expensive leak to fix (a bit more on that in another post), but clearly something that needed to be done. Going forward, I learned that I can check the meter at the street for any indications of a leak--there's a small triangle on the meter that, if there's no water being consumed in the house, should be perfectly still. Ours was spinning at a prodigious rate, even with no water-using-devices running inside the home. I intend to pull the meter cover every month or so from now on, just to insure that we have no fresh leaks.