If you are making an effort to cut down on water use in your home—taking shorter showers, always shutting the faucet off when brushing your teeth, only running the dishwasher and laundry machines with full loads, etc.—you may still find your water bills are far too high. We know this can be frustrating, but you can do something about it. It’s likely there are problems in the pipes and fixtures of your house that are the source of the water waste, causing those higher bills.
As a general guideline, a family of four shouldn’t use more than 12,000 gallons a month. Higher than this means problems are occurring with the plumbing, and in most situations, this requires calling on licensed professionals plumbers—like ours!
To help you find out why your water bills are so high despite your best water conservation efforts, we’ve provided a list of the most common sources of water waste in a plumbing system:
Leaky Faucets
It’s easy to ignore a leaky faucet as a minor problem. People usually only try to have these faucets fixed if the leak is in a bathroom faucet and it’s keeping them awake. But those little drips add up to a huge amount of waste each month, and possibly thousands of gallons each year! Check all your faucets, and if you find water droplets around the bowl when the bowl should be dry, you have faucets in need of fixing or replacing.
Hidden Leaks
Most of the plumbing system of a home is hidden from sight. You don’t want exposed pipes along your walls and ceilings—that’s ugly! But this makes it tough to recognize when the pipes start to leak. High water bills are a good warning sign of leaking pipes. We recommend checking your water meter and writing down the reading, then shutting off all water-using appliances for an hour. Re-check the meter. If it’s risen, you have hidden leaks. Our plumbers offer leak detection services to find where the problems are occurring so we can repair them.
A Running or Leaking Toilet
Because the toilet uses the most water of any indoor appliance in a house (40% of all indoor water use) it can be a major source of water waste if it starts to run or leak. There’s a test you can do here as well to see if your toilet is suffering from leaks: place a few drops of food coloring into the tank, then check a half-hour later to see if any of the colorings have entered the tank. If it has, you have a leaking toilet that will need repairs. If your toilet is more than 20 years old, we recommend you have it replaced with a new low flow model. Where old toilets used 4 to 5 gallons per flush, low-flow models use as little as 1.3 gallons—and that makes a huge difference.
For any residential plumbing service in Clovis, NM you may require, you can count on our plumbers to get the job done. We have more than 16 years of experience in the plumbing business.
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