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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After some more digging in less soggy conditions, and clearing away debris I got down to the real source of the problem. I was dealing with a section of old galvanized pipe which was beyond hope for easy disassembly. Fortunately, after cutting off one side of the valve, I was able to unscrew the other side from it’s connection leading into the house.

After some effort, was able to get all of the broken old bits out of the way with the help of a blowtorch, saws-all (gotta love power tools) and two heavy duty pipe wrenches. This was the first point in the operation that I began to think I might actually be capable of fixing this problem without digging up the front yard and replacing the entire thing with a new pipe as the plumbers had suggested would be required. They also mentioned that, provided I had dug then entire trench to a depth of 6 inches below the pipe, and 24 inches wide before they came out, it would still cost at least $600 to replace the pipe.

I now had a clean gap between two solid looking pieces of treaded pipe. A quick trip to the hardware store yielded the 4 inches of pipe and the various coupling pieces I needed to fill the gap left by the old shutoff valve with a piece of new pipe. I had to apply a lot of pressure to the existing pipe fittings to make this connection which brought on a fear of catalyzing a leak somewhere else still underground. After getting the new bits in, applying thread sealant and tightening them down I fired up the water back at the curb.

It turns out, my handy work was successful. After a few seconds of the water meter spinning like mad as the pipes in the house refilled with water, it came to an abrupt and complete stop. I realize now after comparing our usage since my repair to the past year, that this meter probably hasn’t been in this idle state for many months. After gaining approval from a city inspector, I’m now setting out to file for a leak rebate as offered from the utility. At best, we stand to get a few hundred dollars back when all is said and done. At worst, I at least won’t have to cough up the $341.62 for the previous bill.

UPDATE, 02/27/07:
There have been a number of people finding this post while searching for information on the Seattle leak rebate program. For the benefit of these folks, I can report that I’ve received a response from the SPU stating that my claim has been assigned to a claims professional and I can expect to hear back on a resolution within the next 1-2 months. Meanwhile, all past charges are suspended with the assumption that they will be credited back to the account.

UPDATE, 05/04/07:
SPUD has come through with a generous rebate for us. Our problem has been resolved. Details here:
http://fall-line.com/2007/05/04/city-of-seattle-comes-through-with-water-leak-rebate

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This entry was posted on Sunday, February 11th, 2007 at 6:53 pm and is filed under Home, Home Ownership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.