This month's water bill is $650. I live in a studio apartment. Help?

October 4, 2016 4:00 PM

Hey guys, I am not sure how to handle this situation and could use some advice before I call the water company tomorrow (their office is closed now). So I live in a studio apartment in a large building. I've lived her for 2 years with no issues. My monthly water bill has always been less than $50. Nothing has changed in my water usage of the apartment, but I just got a bill for over $650 from the period of 8/14 through 9/13. This includes a $300 "sewer tax." It says I used 64,119 gallons of water! NOT possible.

Back on 8/23, building maintenance came and fixed my toilet flusher handle. I didn't ask them to--I came home to a note saying they got a notification there may be a leak, they fixed it, and that my water bill had been adjusted. It wasn't a big thing, but before they fixed it the toilet would run for a bit after I flushed it. I had that handle on it for a long time though, probably over a year, and it had been doing that all that time. Last month, I got an expensive water bill (over $100) but just paid it because I didn't want to deal with a hassle and they said the problem was fixed.

Maintenance came in last week because they saw (again) it looked like my apartment was using more water than normal. They found no signs of a leak or overuse. I emailed the maintenance guy about the bill and he asked if the company was willing to negotiate the bill (which I will ask when I call tomorrow).

Not sure what to expect here. There's absolutely no way I used anywhere near this much water.

What should I do from here? I don't have $650 just lying around for a surprise expense. Am I legally on the hook for this bill? They would probably negotiate a payment plan but I don't think it would be fair for me to have to pay this, period, and don't want to get screwed. I rent and it's not my job to make sure nothing's wrong with the water. I think something MUST be wrong with the meter, but how can I show that?

If it matters, I live in Tennessee.

I looked over my lease and didn't find anything relevant. Thank you for any help!

posted by picardythird to Work & Money (24 answers total)

It sounds like a mistake. Don't panic. Pull out your earlier bills to show how far off this is from anything likely when you call the water company. If they are anything other than helpful (unlikely) consider contacting a local TV station. Many have consumer reporters and they love these goofy billing stories.

Also, I think the maintenance people need to do a water audit to see what is up with your place. That's less pressing than calling about this bill.
posted by bearwife at 4:02 PM on October 4, 2016 [9 favorites]

Hopefully you're going to contact them and they'll say it was a mistake and take it back down to the $50 level. But if they don't -- this is the *exact* kind of thing that your local TV station or newspaper's consumer reporter wants to hear about. That usually gets the attention of the higher-ups who can make this bill go away.
posted by BlahLaLa at 4:02 PM on October 4, 2016 [8 favorites]

In situations like this I would call them and have them recheck the meter. I've had crazy bills like this that were simply human error.
posted by Young Kullervo at 4:03 PM on October 4, 2016

What does your lease say about repair costs? If related to a leak, I would consider the excess water bill as part of damages.

I would get legal counsel (tenant org) to help navigate this, but you can usually deduct this from rent after going through hoops that are personal to each jurisdiction. (IANAL, just an avid bureaucratic hoop jumper)
posted by politikitty at 4:05 PM on October 4, 2016

Something you can do tonight: look at your actual water meter and compare it to the meter reading given on the bill.
posted by amtho at 4:09 PM on October 4, 2016 [15 favorites]

That said, it's possible they've been billing you an estimate, and this is the true up. If that's the case, it might be a serious leak somewhere you can't see that has happened over a number of months.
posted by politikitty at 4:20 PM on October 4, 2016 [1 favorite]

A running toilet can use a ton of water in a very short period. I own and was gone for part of the summer and had a friend checking my house. He said the toilet was running when he got there once, two weeks after his previous check when it was fine. He turned off the water to that toilet. My water bill that month was $555 for less than two weeks of a running toilet. After calling the water company, they said they will do two leak adjustments per customer (over what time period I didn't ask). I still had to pay for the water that was used by the toilet, but the penalties of our tiered water rates were excused. I got $382 back the next month.

You might try to understand what responsibility you had per your lease to let them know the toilet was running. If you don't let them know you have a maintenance issue, are you liable for the resulting costs?
posted by cecic at 4:22 PM on October 4, 2016 [1 favorite]

Are you the lowest apartment number by chance? Even if not, you may have ended up as the "default" billing account and could be getting either the entire building's bill or whatever extra water was being used by some other leak that isn't even yours.

Definitely call them and let them know your past usage and that it hasn't changed and don't back down. Good luck!
posted by CoffeeHikeNapWine at 4:23 PM on October 4, 2016

Response by poster: Cecic: that's scary. Can I ask, was that for a CONSTANTLY running toilet? When I say mine would run a little, I mean sometimes, like 5-10 seconds after being flushed (versus how it is now that it's fixed).

CoffeeHikeNapWine: I am the lowest number on my floor but not the building...could that mean anything?

Amtho: I don't think I have access to wherever the meter is, unless I'm super clueless, it's not in my apartment.
posted by picardythird at 4:29 PM on October 4, 2016

Where is your water meter? I once had to deal with astronomical utility bills in NYC (over $1100) because ConEd wouldn't go into the basement to read the meter because the meter reader saw a rat and determined the conditions were unsafe. So ConEd started sending me "estimated" bills.

Getting it fixed took several weeks and a lot of time spent on hold and multiple faxes of invoices from exterminators from the building management to finally convince ConEd that they could safely read my meter again and give me a corrected bill.

So maybe something like this is happening with you utility company?
posted by brookeb at 4:51 PM on October 4, 2016

I own a rental (not TN), spent months dealing with a slow leak, and I worked at a utility once upon a time.

Most utilities will repair any issue up to and including the meter but if the leak is causing your bill to go up then the issue is likely after the meter (which is typically the owner's liability). Definitely see if they'll reread the meter and call your landlord to inform them that the water is reading very high. Also check the local landlord/tenant laws to see what their responsibility is for repairing this type of issue. With my rental I had to repair the issue and pay the excessive usage over what an average bill would be at my property.

If they are estimating the bill most utilities will indicate that on the bill (but it's worth checking to be thorough).
posted by toomanycurls at 5:19 PM on October 4, 2016 [2 favorites]

If you're e-mailing with the manager/maintenance guy, ask that person where the meter is.

Bring a strong light so you can take a photo of it. Get the make/model of the meter if you can, too -- if it's tricky to read, you can look up that type of meter on the Web and figure out what the reading means.
posted by amtho at 5:20 PM on October 4, 2016

We have had luck with sending the water department a copy of the repair bill once the problem was fixed, & they will do an adjustment, at least for a portion of the sewer charges. So if you aren't having luck with the rest, you may want to ask about that.
Good luck!
posted by needlegrrl at 5:21 PM on October 4, 2016

Cecic: that's scary. Can I ask, was that for a CONSTANTLY running toilet? When I say mine would run a little, I mean sometimes, like 5-10 seconds after being flushed (versus how it is now that it's fixed).

I didn't hear it, but my friend said it was not as loud as when a toilet is filling after a flush, but had a constant filling sound. He took the back lid off and said it was leaking around the flapper, but that the tank was still full, if that makes sense. So a very expensive slow leak from a deteriorated flapper. The water company said a running toilet can waste up to 5 gallons a minute and a silent toilet leak up to 40 gallons a day. Mine was toward the more wasteful end of the scale.
posted by cecic at 5:47 PM on October 4, 2016

A toilet can run without it being obvious. Try putting some food dye in the tank after it appears to have stopped running,
posted by idb at 5:56 PM on October 4, 2016 [2 favorites]

Yeah, if the toilet tank is leaking into the bowl, you won't see it, and probably won't hear it. I'm not sure how you'd detect it without the food coloring test described above. The idea is that if the coloring shows up in the bowl after ten minutes or so, there's a leak. And I've only ever heard of this because a neighbor who went through it got a notice from the water authority saying their bill was up to $800 for the month and they might want to look into it.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 6:14 PM on October 4, 2016

I got hit with a HUGE water bill once, and it turned out the underground pipes had been leaking at the entrance point to my line. I called the landlord and the water company and the leak got fixed, and they ended up charging me the rate from the same month the year before. This was in CA, so I'm not sure if the water company will agree to do a correction for you or not.

But if your toilet was running for a whole year and you weren't getting a huge bill, I don't think that would be why it's so large now. I'd call your landlord / mgmt company and the water company and see what you can do. The extra charge may or may not fall on the landlord, depending on the laws and how much negotiating skill you have. Best of luck.
posted by ananci at 6:18 PM on October 4, 2016 [1 favorite]

I once got hit with an enormous water bill (like $10,000 or so) and it turns out they read the wrong meter. I second the thought that you want to follow this up with the company before panicking. We spent two days panicking and calling plumbers and so forth before we got it sorted, and I wish I had those two days back.
posted by forza at 7:18 PM on October 4, 2016

Once our condos got a bill like that. The city put on a new water meter, for a different kind of business, anyway it read wrongly and we got a big credit. Also, that bill might be for the whole set of units, and they accidentally gave you the grand total.
posted by Oyéah at 8:18 PM on October 4, 2016

64,119 is suspiciously close to 65,535, the largest number that fits into sixteen bits. Perhaps you are the victim of computational error — specifically, an integer underflow!
posted by actionstations at 9:29 PM on October 4, 2016 [6 favorites]

Your initial assessment is likely correct: this is not possible. You are getting a lot of true but unhelpful advice regarding toilet leaks. Let's use order of magnitude technique to get a handle on why a subtle toilet leak is not the cause here. While it may be true that toilet leaks can be expensive, and others have given you dollar amounts, the price of water is folded in to any discussion of expensive. That can fluctuate between markets, but you know something more important, the total amount of water they say you used: 64,119 gallons. Let's start there, rounding everything above 3 to 10, 30 to 100, and 30,000 to 100,000. This makes the math easier and will give us a rough feel for if this bill could come from a leaky toilet. Internet tells me a typical old style toilet (assume the worst, since I don't know if you have a low flow toilet) uses 3.6 gallons per flush. We'll call that 10 gallons. That means in the last month the toilet would have to have flushed 100,000/10 = 10,000 times. Divide that by 100 days in a month, and you have 100 times a day. Rounding 24 hours to 10 hours a day, that's 10 times an hour. Could a slow leak correspond to that much water? Now we need an experiment. As it happens, my own toilet was leaking as I read this, so after fixing it, I timed how long it took to fill the tank. It took 80 seconds to fill my low flow, 1.6 gallon tank. Assuming that there's not too much variation in how long it takes to fill a toilet tank, that means the old style tank would take 3 minutes to fill. So, it's just barely possible for a toilet leak to cause that much water usage from our order of magnitude calculation. But of course, only if your toilet was flushing completely 10 times an hour. That is not a subtle leak. But for fun, we'll get more precise:

64,119 gallons/month x 1 month/30 days x 1 day/24 hours x 1 hour/60 min = 1.5 gallons/ minute

But my toilet can only fill at 1.2 gallons/min. So in order for your toilet to be the cause, it would have to be filling constantly all the time and fill 25% faster than mine. The latter might be possible, but you would assuredly hear the former. A leak so subtle you need to put food coloring in the bowl to detect it would not be filling constantly. interestingly, though, this is well within the realm of what a plumbing system can handle (since the toilet flushes faster than it fills, so the waste pipes can handle a much higher rate), so it is not so much water that your house would be flooding from it.
posted by q9f9A at 5:31 AM on October 5, 2016 [4 favorites]

It's not your toilet. We had a constantly running toilet for several weeks last year and, despite having superduper expensive water for a city of our size, our bills only went up like $30. A running toilet does not increase your bill 600%.

There's either a leak in an undetectable location or this is a clerical error. Call the water company and if they do not immediately identify a clerical error, call your landlord.
posted by soren_lorensen at 6:46 AM on October 5, 2016

I am the lowest number on my floor but not the building...could that mean anything?

I used to be Apt. 1 in a small condo building and I got the water bill for the whole building.
posted by Pax at 7:39 AM on October 5, 2016

When i was a kid, this caused a huge kerfuffle in the building my parents managed. It turns out several old ass pipes inside of one of the walls were heavily leaking, but until the very end weren't causing any visible water damage. It took MONTHS to figure this out, and started about the same way.

I'd discuss a possible leak with your landlord, in addition to following up with the city water utility.
posted by emptythought at 10:36 PM on October 5, 2016