Our water supplier read the meter at the start of last September which prompted a letter to me just before they sent the bill saying, “Errr, your bill is going to be quite big. Do you have a leak?”. “Quite big” indeed. The thick end of £7,000 for six months’ supply to a house with five (occasionally six) adults living in it, plus a dozen chickens outside!
So then the “fun” started. The supplier estimated that we were losing somewhere in the region of twenty-nine cubic metres of water per day! Given the meter readings used, the leak must have been happening since July at the very latest and even in one of the driest Summers ever, I’d seen absolutely no sign of a leak. In fact absolutely all the grass in our garden and the surrounding area was yellow and crunchy.
A minor complication for us is that when the house was put on mains water (until the mid-1980s I believe it only had a well) there was no easily accessible water main. So the water supply comes from the main in a nearby road to the meter which is about twenty metres inside the grounds of the local cricket club. From the meter it winds through the cricket club grounds, across a field and into my veggie plot down to the house. A total of about 300 metres. And no-one knows quite where most of it is. How do you go about finding a leak in that lot?!
At first I thought it might be here, where I assume the pipe crosses the field, but by this time we’d had some heavy rain, so perhaps not.
Fortunately our insurers helped out and their contractor eventually decided the leak was on our property, under the steps up to the veggie plot. After some to-ing and fro-ing, just before Christmas digging commenced to try to find it.
And eventually we did.
It was actually necessary to undermine the concrete drive a little to get to it, but at least we didn’t have to have the drive itself cut into pieces.
The repair was fairly straightforward and had to be done quickly to get the water supply back on.
After which the job could be done properly, backfilling with some sand before the spoil after checking that the meter was no longer spinning like a dervish!
Now I’ve taken some readings to get an idea of our current water consumption, the supplier wants further proof before dealing with our claim for a leakage allowance because they’re even lower than before the leak became obvious. I suspect based on the damage to the pipe that the leak may have been happening at a low level for much longer than we realised.
