I received our water bill on Wednesday and it just doesn't seem right.
We have a water meter fitted to our house (6 years old) and we moved in about 18 months ago. Our first bill (estimated) for the first 4 months was £41.00, we then received our second bill last August totalling £217.00 for 6 months use taken from an actual meter reading by water company. However, our bill for the last 6 months is totalling £842.00 and says we have used 339.00 metres cubed of water (or the equivalent of 339,000 litres of water in 6 months/138 days ?)
We rang the water company as soon as the bill came in to query it and they asked us to do a tap test to check for leaks. We duly carried this out and the metre did not move at all. In fact when we checked the metre it has only moved by 12.00 metres cubed within the last 50 days. Now we have done nothing differently in the last 50 days in terms of water usage than we have done in the previous 138 days when we have supposedly used 8 times as much water?
To give you an idea of how much water we use in general there are 2 of us in a 3 bed detached house. We do 4 loads of washing per week (all on Sunday) and I only ever use the 30 degree option (which runs for 48 mins), we only ever use the half flush on the loos, the dishwasher only ever goes on when it is fully loaded (so approx. every 2 days), we have a shower each every day for about 5 minutes each. If we do have a bath (probably max twice a month) then we share the water. I work all day away from home. H uses the home office a few days a week so uses the loo and the kettle but not enough to account for the above (and he is obviously not running the taps all day long!) I cannot see how or what we have done to consume so much water and I am wracking my brains for some answers. If there is no leak then where has all the water gone? The irony is we are both conscious of our water usage for environmental reasons (hence why we use the half flush etc.) and we don't have a lot of money so we have also been careful for this reason.
My only rational explanations are:
- There was a leak during that 6 month period but it has been repaired in that time (is this even possible without us knowing about it?)
- The meter is faulty (although it seems to be working properly based on the last 50 days of water consumption)
- Someone has used/stolen our water from an outside source (can this even happen?)
- We have used the water but don't realise it (somebody tell me how, based on the above, we could have used 2000 litres of water a day for 6 months?!)
FYI the water meter is not attached to any other house as I have checked this. Each house has their own water meter sunk into the pavement at the front of their property (we live on a fairly new development so the water meters were put in at the time the houses were built 5-6 years ago.)
Has anyone else had this problem or know what could be wrong? Thanks.
