My local water utility has software that detects substantial drops in water usage. It is a symptom of a failing meter, and they send you a little card saying they want to come check it out.
I started getting these cards when I first moved into my house. They don’t actually say anything other than “you need a service call.” Turns out it’s because of the drastic drop in water usage from the old owner to the new one.
They use 15 ccf per person per house per six months as the benchmark for usage. Each ccf is 100 cubic feet of water, which is 748 gallons. 15 ccf is then 11,220 gallons, or 1,870 gallons per month, or 93.5 gallons per day.
93 gallons a day? My god!
I used 6 ccf over that same time period, less than half of their benchmark, which is what caused the flag. 6 ccf amounts to an average of 38.5 gallons a day. Still, my god! That’s a ton! But at $0.97 for the water and $1.15 for sewer per ccf it doesn’t pay for me to proactively replace my washer with a more water-efficient one.
Another thing I learned today: all the meters are read by hand. A person can read up to 400 meters a day. Low tech, that’s for sure.
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I live in a small town in central Louisiana. I own a small tutoring business. My business is located in a portable building, with (1) toilet and (1) facebowl. According to the city’s utility department my water and sewage reading was seventy thousand six hundred gallons of water for a 29 day period. They claim that I must have had a toilet to hang-up and when I flushed it that cleared up the problem. They also said that none of that water would have leaked to the surface. I had a plumber in to check for leaks and he found none.Please respond to this.
I’m not an expert in plumbing. The only thing I can think of is double-checking the meter readings to ensure that someone didn’t misread something, and double-checking your past bills to make sure that the readings sync up with each other.
You used 70,600 gallons of water, which is 94.4 ccf. Billed as my city does, that’s $200.10, so probably not worth any serious investigation by professionals, who will charge way more.