How a $10 toilet part has cost us thousands in excess water use
Our water bill has always been ~$300 every two months ever since moving in two years ago. That should have been a huge red flag to me but truthfully I just set up the account and enabled automatic payments and didn’t bother checking. We’re immigrants and just assumed that was a normal water bill here in Ontario, Canada.Well we just got our latest bill and it’s for about $450. Obviously this struck me as odd so I went digging. Since we have a smart meter it reports usage every hour, and this can be aggregated to daily, monthly, etc. I can see that half way through July our usage shot up and stayed that way since then. This screamed leak to me, so I went hunting around the house for the culprit. Eventually after lifting the lid on all the toilet cisterns I found that the downstairs toilet is leaking. It will drain about 2 inches of water and then refill itself, over and over again, constantly. It’s a bad rubber flapper. It has deteriorated and caused a significant leak. It’s a very quiet toilet and we weren’t exactly listening out for it constantly refilling the tank, and we really don’t use it all that much, so we never noticed. I thought “I’ll just get a new flapper, they’re $10 from Home Depot, it sucks that we paid $150 extra for water but shit happens”.That got me thinking about our regular bill… $300 seems high, no? So I Googled. Reddit threads said people’s average bills were like $100, $150 max. Oh shit. I went and looked at our usage again from last year, way before this leak happened. I looked at the hourly usage. We were using almost exactly the same amount of water during the night hours (12am-7am) than we were in the afternoon hours when a shower/dishwasher/washing machine etc wasn’t running. FUCK! This leak has been costing us for YEARS. Only a month and a half ago did it deteriorate to the point of being noticeable. Our water has had a baseline level of usage, every hour around the clock, for two years just from this one leak.So I figure with the amount we were paying for water over the average for a 2 bedroom household, over a 2 year period, this $10 toilet part has cost us thousands of dollars in excess water use that we just never noticed.Not really sure why I’m posting this, except I think I need to laugh at it as a coping mechanism, and I figure a subreddit for the financially conscious would appreciate a laugh and somebody new to be the butt of the jokes.The engineer in me is now wondering why water companies don’t monitor for a very steady baseline level of usage, especially through the night hours, and send a polite letter or email warning the home owner there might be a leak… I’m sure it’s not in their best interest to sell less of what makes them money, but this is a huge waste of water. via /r/PersonalFinanceCanada https://ift.tt/3BB8unk