Water whinge

A little while back we received in the mail a letter from Queensland Urban Utilities (the company/department responsible for water provision and billing that the Bligh government no doubt plans to privatise in the near future) informing us that we may have a leak at our address. We were using, according to this notice, a whopping 726L of water per day. The average water consumption per household in Brisbane is more along the lines of 140L per day, making our supposed usage over five times the average- and that's for a household of two people. Our bill came to a massive $248 for the quarter.

After following the instructions on how to check for a leak, we discovered that there was one. We were losing 3L of water per hour. A whole 72L of water per day, or one tenth of our supposed usage. 72L per day is not to be sneezed at- that's a lot of water. However, given that we almost never water our garden we simply could not fathom where the other supposed 654L per day was being used.

So I compiled an estimate of our water usage based on extreme over-estimates of the biggest users of water in our household (our dishwasher and washing machine are Bosch and rated 4.5-stars for water efficiency). As follows:

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Leak: 72L per day

Dishwasher: 48L per day
(extreme estimate 2 loads per day on a fast cycle using double the amount of water as on regular cycle)

Washing machine: 104L per day
(extreme estimate of 2 loads per day)

Showers: 180L per day
(extreme estimate 2 x 10-minute showers)

Toilet: 60L per day
(extreme estimate of 10 full flushes of old toilet)

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I didn't include things like hand washing, and we pretty much never have to rinse our dishes before placing them in the dishwasher; as I said before, we almost never water our garden.

Even with that extreme estimate of water usage, however, the figure came to only 464L. Round it up to 500L for a really extreme over-estimate and there's still another 226L per day unexplained- and that 226L is almost twice the daily average household consumption.

It's really hard to believe that there is any way we could be using 726L of water per day... I'm planning on disputing the bill. The only thing I can think of is that the meter-reader must have wrongly recorded the numbers- the meter was so dirty when we went to do the check for a leak that we could scarcely read the large numbers (for kilolitres) on the dial; the small dials were completely obscured. I suppose it's possible that the meter itself might be faulty, but if that were the case I would have expected to see more movement in the numbers than we saw during our test. I'm betting that Queensland Urban Utilities will be reluctant to admit it if there is human error involved...