[quote=guidosmom]I saw your post and had to reply, since the exact same thing happened to us. We live in a nice neighborhood in Burbank. After coming home from 2 weeks in Italy, our water bill was $400 over normal!!! I have been in person to the dwp, showed ticket and hotel receipts, even had a representative from the dwp come and check to see if the meter matched up with the bill. It does. We have no leaks anywhere. Given our fence situation, there is unfortunately only one conclusion we can come to, and that is that our neighbor (the only direct one with a pool) tapped into our water supply to fill his pool. He knew the dates we were gone, and I can see on the detailed bill that he did it the night after we left, and the evening before we came home. I mean, the water was on full blast for periods of 10 to 12 hours. But, not having any proof, there is nothing we can do. We can only draw conclusions. It’s really hard to accept this betrayal, since he’s been a neighbor for over 20 years![/quote]
Wow! This is interesting to read about.
Actually one of our neighbors does have a pool! It would be hard for me to believe that someone would steal water. But maybe that is what happened.
As mentioned in a past post, I scheduled for the City of San Diego to come out. They have this free program where they will come out and go throughout the inside and outside of the house.
I was pretty impressed by it and the guy that came out was very friendly. He first went throughout our house and put blue tablets in all the toilets to check for slow leaks from the tank. Then he went out and checked each station of our sprinkler and checked each individual sprinkler head.
Did calculations on the time of each station. He also brought a goodie bag with a some free stuff like a nice spray nozzle for an outside hose, grocery bag and some flower seeds as well as a 5 minute sprinkler timer.
He literally spent 1.5 hours at the house and gave several pages worth of paperwork and projections, tips to save water, recommendations for adjustment on sprinkler heads, loose sprinkler heads, etc.
It was very informative and educational.
All the old posts were correct that the sprinkler heads use about 60% to 65% of your total water bill in a typical household. Ours is probably less with the long showers/bath.
However, I still think that it has to be a case of someone using some water while we were gone. Because we were gone for all but 1 week this summer on the previous bill (52 days of the 60 day cycle). And on THIS projected 60 day cycle (we are already on day 42 of the 60 day cycle), we will a bit less water than on the other bill. It just doesn’t add up.
After we came back from vacation I initially turned the sprinkler time down on each station but the gardner said that with the heat the plants/grass really needed the extra water so we set it back up.
A question for you, guidosmom. You mentioned, you could see on your detailed bill which day he filled it? Does your water bill actually detail out the dates and usage? San Diego bill doesn’t do that. Did you confront your neighbor about it or at least ask them about it?
I’d highly recommend the free inspection from the City. Funny, but I asked the guy that came out today how people find out about it. He said that it’s like my case….they get a really high bill and that gets them more aware and have the City come out and check the meter. He said in the majority of the cases, it’s a case of someone taking a wrong reading in which case the next bill is adjusted/credited.
He said the average shower puts out about 2.5 gallons of water a minute and the average bathtub puts out about 5 gallons of water a minute. We take longer showers plus we have the double shower head. Just doing a rough estimate it sounds like our shower/bath budget is higher than the typical family at about 25% of our total bill. We are using an average of 549 total gallons per day.
Also, I commented to this guy that worked for the City that came out how expensive water is here in San Diego. He said he has been doing this for 15 years and said that San Diego was the most expensive city in the country.
