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  • Money down the drain – literally
  • sharkbait
    Free Member

    Just had our [metered] water bill. It's usually about £170 for 6 months but this time it's £470. Alarm bells start going off in my head so I go out and check the meter and it's spinning like crazy.
    back to the house (70 meters)away and switch off the rising main and the separate rising main in my office. Check the meter, still going mad.
    Back outside and turn off the only other tap I know of that isolates 2 x outside taps and 2 x water troughs in paddocks. Back to the meter and it's stopped.

    Oh c0ck…… we've got a major leak somewhere underground between the isolating tap and the furthest trough which is about 100m away 🙁

    Must have only just happened as our 6 month bill is for 320 cubic meters and yet the meter has already gone up by a further 125 cubic meters since it was read 5 days ago!

    Interestingly we had a water engineer round 10 days ago looking for the source of a leak in a field 500m away. Hmmmmm.

    Either way it's money down the drain.

    TheFunkyMonkey
    Free Member

    Bloody hell, that's 125000 liters in 5 days!
    Check the connections first, it's highly unlikely the pipe will be damaged assuming its a blue mdpe one.
    They usually come in coils of 25m variants, although it shouldn't have any joints ideally

    timwillows
    Free Member

    125 cubic metres in 5 days should be fairly easy to isolate – has a new marsh appeared?

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    sharkbait
    Free Member

    Thats the thing……… the gound's the same as it usually is. We are on pretty sandy stuff here though so it could just disappear – but it seems odd.

    I've narrowed it down to an existing section of galvanised pipe that we didn't replace (as it was under a load of concrete) about 6 years ago when we had a new feed to the house from the meter fitted.
    This has two taps in it separated by about 7 feet. If I turn tap 1 off and leave tap 2 on the meter starts running – but stops when I turn tap 2 off as well, so I imagine the leak is between the two taps.

    outbuildings—————tap1——————tap2—————————-meter

    Inbetween tap 2 and the meter is the feed to the house and inbetween tap 1 and tap 2 is the feed to the office.

    This is with the rising mains into the house and office turned off.

    I'm kind of glad the bill turned up when it did, a couple of months of that usage and I'd be bankrupt.

    sharkbait
    Free Member

    This is the layout:

    thisisnotaspoon
    Free Member

    tell them it was leaking, at least you'd get the sewerage portion discounted surely?

    willard
    Full Member

    10/10 for both the diagram and the detective work!

    Do you reckon you'll be able to find the leak yourself then by just breaking concrete and digging?

    timwillows
    Free Member

    Looks like it is fairly localised and at least you found it quickly

    sharkbait
    Free Member

    I think so. From what I remember of when we had the new main laid it's not exactly rocket science – need to get a breaker and start digging I suppose.
    What I should really do though is replace all of what's left of the galvanised pipe, as if it goes again between tap 2 and the meter there's no way to stop it 😯

    sharkbait
    Free Member

    thisisnotaspoon: good point, I'll ring them. Thanks.

    Come to think of it……… we have a septic tank so no sewerage charges. oh well.

    big_n_daft
    Free Member

    you should consider getting a mole (trenchless pipelaying) it will save you breaking up the concrete

    I would change out all the old pipe

    mountaincarrot
    Free Member

    I had the same with a leak in the front garden after my meter. The original builders had only thrown the black pipe into the soil with no protective gravel. A flint had gone through the pipe. I took a video of the spin rate on the water meter, and the rather exciting fountain (after i dug it out), then worked out from my bills how long it had been leaking and how much had gone (over about a month).

    I got back 200-300 quid from the water company be sweet talking and providing my evidence

    ourkidsam
    Free Member

    We got back (or rather let off with) £1,200 of a £1,400 water bill that was due to a leak that our landlord had failed to deal with for over six months. Water Co seem to be one of the 'reasonable' utilities we have to deal with!

    Scienceofficer
    Free Member

    probably cheaper and quicker to put a new line around the buildings than chase the old one and repair/replace.

    sharkbait
    Free Member

    Well it turns out our buildings insurance may cover this including the cost of the water but I'll wait and see.

    The plan is to replace all the remaining galvanised pipe (which is probably no more than 15 meters (some in a paddock and about 3 meters under concrete) and lay a new rising main into the office. Although I don't think we'll come across the leak itself, it will fix the problem because I think the leak is on an unused branch that went into the house and is now superceded.

    I'm still struggling to believe that it could leak 25,000 ltrs/day though. If it was that bad I'd have thought that our taps would not have worked – which they did.
    I'm going to use the same company that did the new main a few years ago. They were going to mole the hole lot but found that in the paddock at least it was quicker to dig a small trench due our sandy soil impacting in front of the mole and making it very slow work.

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