Mysterious "leak" - going to go to battle with the water department....

[cgilley]

Need some practical thoughts and experience here. I live north of Atlanta in an area where the county water department has gone full NAZI mode. Once you go past a certain amount of usage, the per gallon charges go up exponentially. They call this tiered usage. Now, I will be honest here - I know there must be some good people working for the county, but I know the commissioners are corrupt at worst and lackadaisical at best. The permit and inspection departments are completely braindead, and just about everyone else is a family member of someone who gave them a job, etc.

So a few years ago, the county started switching to smart meters. These have little antennas in them that when the meter trucks drive by they query your usage. In my house, I know what the average usage is per day. I run about $40/month. Imagine my surprise and panic when this month's bill came in at $250. That's a lot of water. Being an engineer, I thought the worst. Checked toilets - no leaks ( a few months ago I rebuilt all 5 of them). Checked laundry connections, no leaks. Dove into the crawlspace fully expecting to find it flooded - dry. Verified no soggy spots in the yard. Hmmm.

Pulling up the water departments website, they now helpfully show your water usage. I can go back years. All of the usage is as expected except for 3 days in early march where day 1, the usage starts to spike - 10 times the average 5000 gallons), day 2 is over 50 times (10000 plus gallons) , day 3 is trending down (5300 gallons) day 4 is 4100 gallons and then after that we're suddenly back to normal at less than 300 gallons per day.

This seems to be some sort of glitch in the system. Has anyone here seen something like this? Did I miss something in my property check? I could see a mainline breaking and leaking underground, but this would not explain the usage returning to normal. We're talking 20k gallons of water - that's a large swimming pool.

Would it make sense to have a plumber come out and sanity check things? The water consumption has gone back to normal, so I'm not sure I'd be wasting their time and my money.

 

[BlueSkyHigh]

Those spikes are concerning. If things are back to normal and you can attest to the fact or prove that you didn’t do anything extraordinary on those three days, I’d ask them to adjust the bill for those three days.

 

[cgilley]

Those spikes are concerning. If things are back to normal and you can attest to the fact or prove that you didn’t do anything extraordinary on those three days, I’d ask them to adjust the bill for those three days.

I agree. Very bizarre. I should have posted the usage chart. This is over the past 2 months. The year plot is even more striking

 

[havasu]

Someone in my city was just charged $5000 for one month of water. They showed the city council all their bills for the last 36 months, and all averaged $60 a month. It still fell on deaf ears when he pleaded his case to the Mayor and city council members.

I suppose installing the daily monitor onto your incoming water pipes could show it is their fault and not yours, but those monitors cost $700-$800 plus installation.

I would demand that your city water inspect their remote meter reading and determine if they had a glitch or not.

 

[pasadena_commut]

Water theft is a thing.

Was the OP or OP's family home on those days? If not, did a neighbor put in a new pool in that time frame? If yes, does their water bill show 20k gallons of usage?
That might have been 5 or so fully pumped up water trucks (4000 gallons each) or somebody filling a pool. Seems like about the right time to fill a pool through a garden hose. Hard to believe anybody in the house would not have noticed those events if they were home though.

Does the OP have a pool? If so be sure there isn't some bizarre failure mode where it drains the pool surreptitiously (into a pipe, not into the street) while topping it off continuously.

What this was not was a leak, because that much water dumped in that short a time would have left a big hole in the ground somewhere, or at least a huge muddy spot. Also leaks of that magnitude do not just stop by themselves. Hmm. A broken soft water system might be able to do this, they all have a drain into a sewer line for when the salt is used to wash calcium off the beads, and they move the water under fully automatic control. A stuck sprinkler zone might do it too, but there would have been a really obvious flood.

Software and hardware glitches are also a thing. Assuming the OP was home then this was probably one or the other. No way for you to know which, or even where - the error might have been in the meter, in the reader, or in the processing of the data. If it comes to legal fisticuffs demand access to the raw read data for the entire city for the year ending in the month after this took place. That would let you or your lawyer troll through and look for similar events. (If the data is in a reasonable format a computer could do this sort of analysis in seconds. For 100K accounts it is only 36.5M values for a year. ) It would also probably be a PITA for the city to produce and they might settle rather than have to produce it.

 

[cgilley]

OP here - we typically average close to 300 gallons per day. You can see this from the image earlier. In answer to your rhetorical but sensible questions: 1) I have a hot tub. I know when I drain and refill. That happened in December (sadly it's been a while since I've been in it, but that's another issue). 2) Neighbor on one side is pushing 90, no pool; the other are two school teachers - one of whom I watched grow up - not a chance there. 3) that much water should have left a swamp. I never water my grass, there is no irrigation system, no water system - just a basic house.

As for glitches - leaning that way. Calling them today.

 

[Twowaxhack]

I wouldn’t trust a school teacher. Just read the news.

 

[chinarus]

I would consider submitting a FOIA request for all meters and all days as someone suggested. I lived in an east ATL bedroom many y community many years ago and watched builder / owner tie his sprinkler system in Front of the meter . Just another corrupt county.....

 

[pasadena_commut]

A search for "Atlanta huge water bill" turns up a fair number of hits. A few are from actual leaks (main line to house) that apparently were not visible on the surface. Not sure how that would happen. Maybe the house is built on gravel with 12" of dirt over that? Anyway, it is possible to show that such a leak is not present (rule out a bad meter). For instance, run a hose from a neighbor with a flow gauge on it (Orbit sells one for around $15), to a hose bib (need a male to male garden hose adapter, $5?), turn off water at curb and everywhere in house except to the hose bib where the water comes in. That won't reveal a big leak in the OP's house since clearly that isn't going on now. It might still be worth trying it though to demonstrate that there is not still a small leak. If only to rule out the "the leakage is present but varies with time" argument from the water company.

I would also make the argument that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" - if the water company cannot make a reasonable explanation for where all that water went they should not be able to bill for it. Right now they are sort of claiming that their elephant is in your closet.

Can a running toilet use that much water? We have occasionally had the chain knot up so that the flap stays up, and the toilet runs continuously. Hard to ignore the resulting noise though. I can hear that sound from anywhere in our house, and my hearing sucks. 10k gallons in 24 hours is 6.94 gpm, our toilets max out at something like 2 gpm, but maybe some other toilet models fill faster and have a higher rate? Measure this on your toilets so that you have data to show that they could not have been the source of the leak.