Crazy high water bill

[bfirecat]

We live on a hillside, so I imagine our neighboors below us would have been flooded...

 

[MolaMola]

Right. That's what I don't understand. Unless there was a pipe channelling the water away, someone would have noticed. And your house would have sunk into the wet ground. Baffling. $45 seems like a cheap fee for finding out for sure about the meter, but not if they just say it's all good. I wonder if there is a consumer advocacy group that could help or maybe your city.

 

[MolaMola]

Any updates?

 

[bfirecat]

We turned off all our irrigation.
EBmud came out to install a water flow meter and water use is back to normal.
They ended up giving us 50% in credit. So $1800 instead of the $3300.

Painful, but not much more to do.

Happy new years all

 

[jccaclimber]

Now that you have the flow meter can you turn the sprinklers on and see the flow rate by section?
When I had a (smaller) water leak a couple years ago the water utility was able to give me usage on an hourly basis. It was roughly a log curve increasing. I got lucky and found out after just a couple days.

 

[JVU]

If you think it could be the irrigation, I would certainly be trying to find the problem now rather waiting until it gets hot and you need it on to deal with it. I’ve had some nightmare irrigation leaks, and they can be surprisingly difficult to figure out and fix. Best to work on it before you need it.

 

[ofzakaria]

You should call your water company, they will come and check for leaks for you.
Something similar happened to me,the water company sent someone. They ask you to close all faucets in the house then they monitor the water meter if its registering any water flow. This will tell you if you have sn internal leak somehwere.
Then they start asking you to turn on diffrent systems like irrigation, rodi, ..etc, and see the impact on the water meter to correlate reading.

if indeed it turn out to be a leak,most water companies will give you waive or discount your bill to account for the leak.

In my case it was the water heater my bill jumped from normal 300$~400$ to 800$.
After I fixed the water heater the water company credited me back 300$

The bill you have is crazy it must be be a leak(big one) or a constant water flow9ng through somewhere.

Keep us posted

Sent from my SM-G960U using Tapatalk

 

[bfirecat]

We turned off all the irrigation systems and are probably just going to re-landscape both sides.
It seems like it would be inevitable that the water leaks again.
With our hillside, its hard to do gardening/irrigation fixes since the junipers are super thick.

 

[Flagg37]

You didn’t have a neighbor that recently emptied and refilled his pool did you?