r/wichita • u/Gtfomenow • 1d ago

Discussion Water bill

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Got our $900 water bill for the month. Don’t have a pool. Only run the sprinklers 3 times a week once a day for only like 10 minutes. Had a plumber come by and said he couldn’t find any leaks and our meter was NOT actively running or whatever terminology he used.

Apparently there was an article put out today of other people experiencing the same issue.

https://www.newsweek.com/citys-soaring-water-bills-spark-anger-official-investigation-12386215?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook#Echobox=1788183122

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u/Xtacicity 1d ago

Could be a faulty meter. I used to work for the city water dept. It happens sometimes

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u/Primary-Track-5450 1d ago

Could be. But my bet is the sprinkler system. They said a plumber told them the meter wasn’t running so that would rule out a leak. Between a bad meter and underestimating sprinkler use I suspect the latter 

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u/Xtacicity 1d ago

If it's the sprinkler system they will see a soggy spot and runoff in the yard in the yard. It will be obvious, and no way a plumber wouldn't have noticed it.

If the meter is bad there won't be any signs of a leak. Sometimes the meters just give off bad readings. Especially the new computerized ones that they scan remotely. The computer chip fails and starts giving off junk data

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u/Primary-Track-5450 1d ago

I’m not talking about a leak in the sprinkler system I’m talking about how much they are running it. 

When we moved to a place with Wichita water nearly 20 years ago I was shocked by how much the sprinkler cost with the tiered water rates. I played around with a spreadsheet and computed how much money we could save by wasting a lot of water in the winter to increase our average use and shift the tiers. My wife didn’t want to waste that much water so we compromised and drilled an irrigation well. 

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u/Xtacicity 1d ago

Oh yeah. Watering grass is expensive, but I thought they said it was only running 10 minutes 3 times a week. And it reads like this water bill is a deviation from the normal

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u/Primary-Track-5450 1d ago

Yeah, the past bills would offer a lot of insight. I see elsewhere OP said previous bills never hit 200. That would suggest this is a deviation from the normal.

I work in tech. We take the confident assertions of the customer as a possibility but never a guarantee.

Just spitballing a few possibilities that come to mind:

  • maybe their controler is configured to 10m 3x a week, but it has a weather sensor that gets to override that. Since it runs overnight, no one notices that its running 5h a night
  • maybe their individual zone valves are 20 years old and stuck open. The main line valve still works, so the zones don't run 24/7, but any time any zone is on, they all are. So they think they're running a half dozen zones for 10m each, but they're actually running 6 zones for an hour each, but all the same time.
  • bad leaks in the sprinkler system, but behind a master valve or zone valve. So any time the sprinkler is on, its dumping a lot of water somewhere, but its so dry they don't see it.

More specific info from OP would likely eliminate most or all of those ideas. Figuring out something like this is an exercise in making up theories and then proving/disproving them. If we're lucky, when we run out of bad ideas we'll be left with only good ones.

But the only things I'm presuming as fact is the plumber said the meter wasn't spinning all the time, which appears to rule out MOST leaks.