Make sure to keep track of water consumption and check your water meter regularly to catch leaks early. If you have a 1/32” stream of water from your faucet, 25 gallons of water is wasted in a 24-hour period and 750 gallons would be wasted in one month. A 1/8” stream of water wastes 400 gallons in 24 hours and 12,000 gallons in one month.
Inspect these sources of wasted water often and have them repaired at once. Your water meter is registering the leakage.
If you find that you have an unusually high bill, it is often caused by a leak or a dramatic change in water use. Some typical causes of high water bills include:
- A running leaking toilet or dripping faucet
- A running or leaking toilet can waste up to 750 litres of water per day, that equates to roughly 67.5m3 in a quarterly billing cycle. A leaky toilet at this rate will cost you approximately $400.00 a quarter. A simple way to check is by placing food colouring in your toilet tank and waiting 20-30 minutes to see if the colour seeps into the bowl of the toilet.
- Filling or topping off a swimming pool
- Watering the lawn, new grass, or trees; also leaking hoses or faucets outside the home.
- For each regular sprinkler head that runs for an hour there is 0.7 m3 of water consumed. If 5 sprinkler heads are running for an hour that is 3.5 m3 of water consumed. If you continue to water with 5 sprinkler heads for an hour every second day that amounts to 158 m3 used for watering the lawn which would result in a bill of $782.00.
- Kids home for summer vacation or school holidays
- Guests
- A broken pipe or obvious leak; check pipes in the basement or crawlspace
- A leaking or faulty water heater
- Water softener problems
Generally, water consumption increases by 50% during the summer due to watering of lawns, filling pools, and gardening.