EddieWalker
Epic Contributor
Hi Don,
I had a house that sat at the bottom of a hill. The water line was 1,200 feet.
The house was empty, but the water had been turned on for seveal months. One month I got a bill saying I'd uses 26,000 gallons of water!!!!
The water department said I had a leak and it was my responsibility. I called in a leak detector who said he could start checking, but doubted he'd find it. According to him, some lines have lots of little leaks and individually each one is too small to find, but collectively they all add up to allot of water comeing out.
The original installer used thin wall 1 inch pvc.
I also did a preasure test at the house and the water preasure was over 100 pounds. The length of the run and elevation drop increased the water preasure over 20 pounds from the meter!!!
I was also told by my local water district that too much preasure on toilets will cause the water to keep running. It just pushes the water past the valve into the bowl. This isn't your problem since you turned off the valve and the meter is stil running.
Another thing he said was that in some water districts, the pumps create a surge effect on their water mains. This can be seen with a guage as preasure increase and decreases. If you don't have a backflow valve at the meter, it will increase your reading without you using any water.
It happens like this. Water is forced into your long line past the meter by the surge, or high preasure. This is recoreded ont the meter as water passing through.
When the water preasure drops, it goes back through the meter to the mains, but this isn't recorded on the meter. This can go on for days, or in my case weeks at a time.
I was able to show this to that water district and force them to install a backflow valve and new meter. But they wouldn't give in on the leak and forced me to pay the bill and replace the pipe. 1,200 feet of new schedule 40 pipe is a pain in the but!!!!
Hope this helps in some way,
Eddie
I had a house that sat at the bottom of a hill. The water line was 1,200 feet.
The house was empty, but the water had been turned on for seveal months. One month I got a bill saying I'd uses 26,000 gallons of water!!!!
The water department said I had a leak and it was my responsibility. I called in a leak detector who said he could start checking, but doubted he'd find it. According to him, some lines have lots of little leaks and individually each one is too small to find, but collectively they all add up to allot of water comeing out.
The original installer used thin wall 1 inch pvc.
I also did a preasure test at the house and the water preasure was over 100 pounds. The length of the run and elevation drop increased the water preasure over 20 pounds from the meter!!!
I was also told by my local water district that too much preasure on toilets will cause the water to keep running. It just pushes the water past the valve into the bowl. This isn't your problem since you turned off the valve and the meter is stil running.
Another thing he said was that in some water districts, the pumps create a surge effect on their water mains. This can be seen with a guage as preasure increase and decreases. If you don't have a backflow valve at the meter, it will increase your reading without you using any water.
It happens like this. Water is forced into your long line past the meter by the surge, or high preasure. This is recoreded ont the meter as water passing through.
When the water preasure drops, it goes back through the meter to the mains, but this isn't recorded on the meter. This can go on for days, or in my case weeks at a time.
I was able to show this to that water district and force them to install a backflow valve and new meter. But they wouldn't give in on the leak and forced me to pay the bill and replace the pipe. 1,200 feet of new schedule 40 pipe is a pain in the but!!!!
Hope this helps in some way,
Eddie
