How to find water leak

[SplashMo]

Our water bill is unusually high. There are no signs of water anywhere that I can find yet.

ANy thoughts on troubleshooting?

 

[ironpig70]

Unusal high as in how many thousand of gallons?

Have you had anybody over for an extended stay that would affect the water usage?


Is your house on a cement slab or a raised foundation? If it is a raised house with a crawl space its time to get on grubby clothes and climb under and find all your water pipes and look for a leak. A small pin hole in a pipe can have a big impact on the water use.

 

[MistressMerryweather]

Are you positive that one of your toilets is not running? This can really cause your water bill to skyrocket.

 

[GoofyMomInOhio]

Do you know where the water meter is inside your house? If so, make sure all water is off, including faucets and toilets, then watch to see if the meter is changing. If it is changing then you might have a leak somewhere. Make sure you check your outside hose faucets to see if they are totally shut off too.

 

[sdzman]

I had this happen one time and yep the toilet was running in our daughters bathroom. I hardly ever went in there so no way I could know. Our bill had jumped up over 3500 gallons one month, crazy.

 

[SookieStackhouse]

We had a similar problem within the last few days (still trying to figure out what is going on, we suspect a toilet)....I called the city and asked.

They told us,

1. make sure everything in the house is off (that uses water)
2. open your water meter
3. look for a little red triangle on your meter
4. if the triangle is spinning, you have a leak
5. if i is not, you do not have a leak

 

[Nayan]

Turn off everything "noisy" (tv's, radio's, kids ) and listen closely around your water heater, washer and sinks. My DH kept hearing water running around our washer and it turned out to be a leaking pipe under the concrete. Huge budget buster to get that fixed, but our water bill would have been triple if he didn't find it. Good luck and I hope it's a simple fix!

 

[dzorn]

For the toilet. After it is finished filling put some food coloring in the tank and let it sit if the water in the bowl turns it is not sealed properly from the tank to the bowl.

Denise in MI

 

[jmsaj]

Are you positive that one of your toilets is not running? This can really cause your water bill to skyrocket.

This is so true...I did not even imagine how much a toilet can affect the water bill....I had a faulty toilet that would run like it was filling a few times occasionally not sure how often. I was like it cant be that much water. Got my water bill (which is normally around 120 per 3 months) it was a whopping $365. Needless to say I was so shocked.

 

[southern_redhead]

Turn off everything "noisy" (tv's, radio's, kids ) and listen closely around your water heater, washer and sinks. My DH kept hearing water running around our washer and it turned out to be a leaking pipe under the concrete. Huge budget buster to get that fixed, but our water bill would have been triple if he didn't find it. Good luck and I hope it's a simple fix!

We had this happen just this month, well actually it has been going on for a couple of months. At first I could hear a "drip, drip" noise in the bathrooms. I would go around checking all the faucets and none were on, I would look under the sinks, etc... but couldn't see any water. Eventually the "drip, drip" became like the sound you hear when you turn your outside water hose on. I could hear water "running somewhere" but you couldn't isolate the sound. Again, I made trips through the whole house looking for leaks, even around the washing machine and in the kitchen. Nothing. There was no water outside around our home so my husband was adamant that we didn't have a leak. Well, short story long , we found water under BOTH of our hot water heaters and the plumbers came and found the bottoms rusted out. They had to replace both tanks and I said "Wow, I guess that solves that mystery" and told them about the noise. They looked at each other like "Oh, my" and one of them said, "These leaks wouldn't have caused that noise." They, too, made trips through my house and couldn't find anything. They even pulled off paneling in my basement stairwell to look at the bathroom pipes to see if they could find anything....nada. Well, one of them crawled under the house and SURE ENOUGH there is a leaking pipe. It was a copper pipe and it had "pinholed" in two places and was spraying the water UP and onto the underside of the house. By the time it hit the ground it was a pretty fine spray and I guess the ground absorbed it. Needless to say, if I hadn't mentioned it we could have gone on that way a looong time. Our sewage has been slightly high for a while and it may have been that it was "dripping" for months. This month our water bill was double the usual so we knew this was the first month to have a total "blow out".

Moral of the story is look and look some more. Then, if you can't find anything, call someone else to look.

 

[HM]

Ours was REALLY bad last time (more than double what it should have been) and when we determined we had no leaks that we could find...we called and had the water people come out. Turns out our meter had died.