Static Zombie

Dunno if this will work, but once I had a water leak, and upon mentioning it to a manager at the local water company, he deducted part of the "sewage" cost since it is based on water usage. Dunno if you can get a similar break, but won't hurt much to try, eh?

Dunno if this will work, but once I had a water leak, and upon mentioning it to a manager at the local water company, he deducted part of the "sewage" cost since it is based on water usage. Dunno if you can get a similar break, but won't hurt much to try, eh?

Water is actually pretty cheap - while a leak like that may well have wasted a good amount of water, it shouldn't really cost all that much.

Of course, you may well be attacked my eco-nuts now, for such ecological waste. And repairing your fur coat WILL be expensive.

Whenever we leave to go on trips, we turn all of the water off, so things like that don't happen. I know this is a little late for such advice, but you could still do it for your next trip.

Oh, Ouch! Sorry to hear that- the Cabin that we stayed at had some plumbing problems just recently as well, which resulted in the loss of some where around 15 thousand gallons of water, but that went into the ground- just how messed up is your house/basement?

It could be worse. When Brian left Pittsburgh over the summer to come to San Antonio for our wedding, the bathroom sink had a leak. When we got back to his apartment, the entire bathroom was covered with green mold.

I've got my story too: A water pipe that broke in the backyard while we were in Steamboat Springs for a weekend. Get this: 50,000 gallons of water wasted. And during a drought no less. Turns out that the insurance paid for it (while they were paying to recarpet our whole basement & buy us new furniture). I think Larry's right, though: you've not wasted that much money, I'll bet. I doubt it'll be worth calling insurance.

It did make me think, however: How much could it cost to have a little device on the water meter that was able to sense when (as in our case) you're using all the water you can for 48 hours straight & just shut off the water? Even smaller leaks, like yours Peter, would probably be an obvious difference from normal use. Give it a little reset switch (in case of false positive), a way of adjusting the shut-off point (X% of full volume use for Y minutes = shut off), and you'd have a real life-saver. I'd pay $50 for that on my meter.

Damon: The water didn't leak, the toilet just failed to shut off normally. It was The Flush That Never Ended.

I figure it takes about a minute for the toilet tank to refill, and I estimate that it holds about 5 gallons of water. That's 300 gallons an hour, which over the estimated 53 hours it was running means 15,900 gallons of wasted water.

There are 748 gallons per CCF of water. Each CCF is about $8.50. That's about 21 CCF, or $178. Ok, so that's not a second mortgage. But still...

Most annoying is that the water itself costs only about $2.50 per CCF. The sewage charge is more than double that. So I'm paying a sewage fee for clean water. D'oh!

A lot of home toilets nowadays use the 1.6 gallons per flush (gpf) standard. If you estimate 1 minute to be the time it takes to refill after a normal flush, then the amount it refilled in 1 minute is only 1.6 gallons. So you're off by a factor of 3 and it'll only cost you ~$60. However, I think the real answer is in between and closer to your estimate of $178, because unless your flow rate is very low, it takes less than 1 minute to refill (although it might _feel_ longer! :) ) plus the flow rate for an empty tank is perhaps higher then the flow rate for an almost-full tank.

This all reminded me of those job interview questions that ask you to estimate this and that, like how many barbers are there in the US? How much pasta is consumed per person per year? And my favorite: If the empire state building were filled with pennies, would that amount of money be enough to BUY the empire state building?