Small water leak adds up to big bill
Our last water bill came a couple of weeks ago. We where charged $341.62 for December and January. This, apparently, is what it costs to use an average of 311 gallons of water every day - ouch. Not only does this hurt financially, it’s also a tremendous waste of natural resources.
This was Friday evening, and I immediately phoned up a few plumbers looking for some help fast. Of the plumbers that I spoke to however, most couldn’t help me on the weekend. The one that could required me to first have a professional underground leek finder service out to pinpoint the leak - who couldn’t come out on the weekend. I suspected that the leak was in the front of the house near the old shutoff valve, which would explain the moisture I noticed a couple of months ago in the crawl space. With nothing else to do, I started to dig…
It turns out the hunch was right on. After about an hour of digging and clearing roots, I was still a ways away from clearing the pipe itself. I had however confirmed my suspicion that the leak was coming from the area around the valve. At this point, there still wasn’t much that I could do since the leak was coming from the shutoff valve itself. If I cut the pipe, I’ve got hundreds of gallons of water flowing out every few minutes.
I called up the surprisingly helpful folks at the Seattle Public Utilities looking for help. For a small fee they sent someone out to shutoff the water 6 feet underneath my sidewalk, down at the main line. Fortunately this was accomplished fairly easily and he was able to cut in a permanent and easy to operate shutoff valve just upstream of my water meter. Whit this in place I was able to shutoff the water to the house and stop the hemorrhaging for the night. The next day, I got to work.
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