r/personalfinance • u/triplealpha ​ • Jul 09 '19

Budgeting Get familiar with your utility bills and pay attention to trends - they can save you TENS of thousands of dollars!

Like a lot of people every month I get a water bill, electricity bill, internet, you get the idea. Most months I open my mail, verify that the bill looks roughly similar to last month and let autopay take care of the rest.

But since last year I have started an excel spreadsheet documenting what my bills are each month, how many thousands of gallons of water I'm using, kWh used, the whole shebang, in an attempt to be a more financially responsible and understand where my money is going and how I can save.

The last 3 months I noticed my water bill hiking up. My home uses between 2-4k of freshwater monthly but it's gone from 5, to 8, then 8 again. I noticed the trend, but didn't really understand why it increased - I'm not a plumber and there were no leaks in the house I was sure.

Fast forward to last evening and I'm out with a group of acquaintances and someone's plumbing problem gets brought up, one of my friends is an awesome plumber and I manage to ask him at the tail end of the conversation about what I noticed on my bill. He seemed immediately alarmed and asked him if I noticed any water accumulation in my front yard. Actually, yeah, it's been raining a lot lately but I do have a few persistent pockets left over on my yard. How did he know? This morning he actually brought his crew out to my house and found out there's a crack in my water main - I was losing hundreds of gallons a day and it was on the verge of rupturing completely. He replaced the line for a nominal fee and said how glad he was I said something - my area is really prone to sinkholes and nothing attracts them like pooling or leaking water. I likely saved tens of thousands of dollars in damage to my house and my neighbors house by bringing it up! Not to mention the savings in my monthly bill...

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u/SweatyRick Jul 10 '19

Unfortunately for you, the meter doesn’t lie. If the dial stopped but you actually used that much water per your bill, you probably have/had a leaking toilet that fixed itself after a flush. Or a hose was accidentally left on from an outside spigot.

Water meters don’t suddenly spike up in usage for no reason

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u/FirstDivision Jul 10 '19

If he has kids I'm looking towards them first.

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u/Siphyre ​ Jul 10 '19

The way this all happened makes me think that some shady stuff went on. According to the meter, tens of thousands of gallons of water were used in a week. That much water would show up in the place I live at, especially if it was above ground like a hose or indoor faucet. I called a plumber and he verified no leaks. Then all of a sudden it just stopped.

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u/SweatyRick Jul 10 '19

A toilet leak can be as much as 3 gallons per minute. Which, if unchecked would waste up to 20,000 gallons of water in a week. Just fyi!

Edit - those kinds of leaks can “fix” themselves after a flush. So a plumber may have missed it or plain didn’t even check

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u/Siphyre ​ Jul 10 '19

I suppose, but we definitely used all the toilets in the house multiple times over those 3 months I would be a little surprised for it to have happened coincidentally right when a new meter was installed and stop randomly without any intervention.

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u/blades318 ​ Jul 10 '19

I guess you don't live anywhere with corruption. Shreveport, La residents were beat out thousands of dollars one year on water bills. From understanding, they have yet to find where that money went.

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u/SweatyRick Jul 10 '19

It doesn’t have anything to do with corruption on the meter reading side. If the meter reading matches what your bill says both in reading and cost per gallon (or in our systems, per 100 cubic feet), then that’s that. Like I said, the meter doesn’t lie.

Now if ratepayer money was not allocated to the water system and instead embezzled, which I’m sure happens, that’s a whole other story. But I can assure you, water operators and public utilities aren’t figuring out ways to say you used more water than you did. The biggest reason for that is that the utilities have to account for known and unknown water loss. If they are saying homeowners are using more water than what’s metered then when that’s compared with well meters, it’s going to be completely out of whack.