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We recently sold our home and per inspector had a licensed plumber install a new expansion tank. We moved out, but continued to visit the home to clean, so we know there is no water on and no leaking toilet. We just received our final bill saying we used almost 250,000...yes, 250,000 gallons of water in 8 days!! When we were not even using the water daily. Not sure if the new expansion tank could be faulty or any other explanation would be helpful. We had the meter re-read and the actual reading is correct. Thanks!

chicks
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Beth
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    If you can watch the meter yourself, make sure all faucets etc are turned off and see if it is still showing water flow. Then, shut of your main water shutoff valve downstream of the meter and check again if water flow is showing on the meter. An expansion tank can only a small amount of water, so I'd suspect something else. Try to check all outlets, like the water heater's overpressure valve. – Armand Sep 06 '22 at 22:48
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    Is the new expansion tank 250,000 gallons? Imagine if you used that much water in 8 days, your house would be floating away. If your pipe from the city is 1 inch with average flow, then it would take 4.6 days with that pipe wide open(cut). Think something screwy is going on. – crip659 Sep 06 '22 at 22:48
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    I've had many problems with meters that don't work. One time I cut off the main valve and the meter ran backwards. Unfortunately they wouldn't pay me for water supplied :-) If you can, take note of the meter reading and turn off the water for a period and see what happens with the reading. If it behaves, turn it back on and fill a 5 gallon bucket and re-read. – user7264855 Sep 06 '22 at 22:51
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    There are 86400 seconds in a day, and about 250,000 seconds in 3 days. Therefore you are using 0.4 gallons **per second** or 25 GPM. I seriously doubt a 3/4" main feed pipe could even supply that. This data can't be right. – Harper - Reinstate Monica Sep 06 '22 at 23:21
  • Is this an old-fashioned mechanical meter with little spinning dials or an electronic/smart kind with an LCD? I could imagine the latter developing a fault that makes it display complete gibberish, but not the former. – TooTea Sep 07 '22 at 07:18
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    The volume of water is equivalent to a cube with 10.4m or 34ft on each side. If you would fill up a room up to 3m height with all that water, the room would have to be 379m² or 4080sqft. So the volume of water we are talking about is very probably larger than the volume of your house. – Dakkaron Sep 07 '22 at 11:30
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    I'm thinking somebody misread a `.` as a `,`, so you've actually only used 250 gallons? – Darrel Hoffman Sep 07 '22 at 14:07
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    Perhaps your neighbors recently installed a new Olympic-sized swimming pool? If so, good news, it is almost half full now! – user3067860 Sep 07 '22 at 15:35
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    Would you mind posting a picture of the bill, after covering all identifying information? I'd really love to see this. – jay613 Sep 07 '22 at 17:37
  • @Harper-ReinstateMonica **8 days. – MonkeyZeus Sep 07 '22 at 17:57
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    Curious to know the dollar amount of the final bill, and perhaps some rough indication of the location would be helpful. – erickson Sep 07 '22 at 18:46
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    Please update when you find out; I'm fascinated to learn the resolution of this. – Alexander Nied Sep 08 '22 at 19:50
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    Is the meter inside your house? I've heard of stories where the meter is a ways away from the house and and the water line between the meter and house was ruptured without any evidence of a water in the yard. Though I admit 250000 would be extreme. – rtaft Sep 09 '22 at 12:39
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    250,000 gallons is enough water to fill a dozen residential swimming pools. Definitely push back against that bill, and please let us know the outcome! – Martha Sep 09 '22 at 20:37

4 Answers4

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No, a new expansion tank could not cause this.

A pipe or valve being broken during the repair could cause a leak, and a leak on your side of the water meter could cause a lot of water to be used, but a quarter million gallons is a lot of water!

A possible explanation is that your water company hasn't been reading your meter faithfully and has instead been estimating your water usage. Now that they've made a "final" reading of the meter, the current meter reading may show just how far off their estimate was.

If this is the case you may really have used all of that water, but over the last X number of months/years, not 8 days. If that is the case, I guess it's up to you how much you can push back against the bill for them being negligent or not billing you in a timely manner, but that's a different question... ;)

spuck
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    This could very well be right but holy moly is that negligent. My bill has a "previous" and "current" field. They read the meter every other bill so "current" will have either "(estimated)" or "(actual)" affixed to it. – MonkeyZeus Sep 07 '22 at 11:58
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    Might also be a meter **mis**reading. It happens. – ceejayoz Sep 07 '22 at 14:11
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    @ceejayoz, you are spot on. If I were the OP, I would ask the utility to please re-confirm the meter reading and ask if it seems reasonable that I used so much water in so little time. A few years back my uncle got a natural gas bill for $25,000+. He asked the utility if it was even possible for his meter to handle that much flow in a month. Things got sorted out after that. – spuck Sep 07 '22 at 15:01
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    This happened to me with my natural gas meter. It should be illegal for these companies to estimate your bill... in my case the rep said "oh ya, looks like the meter reported a malfunction in october of last year" which was 9 months ago. Why the heck did they not send someone out for 9 months to fix it!? – SnakeDoc Sep 07 '22 at 16:18
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    @SnakeDoc illegal? that seems a stretch. A lot of people keep dogs in their yards or have locked gates so reading a meter isn't always practical. – Dean MacGregor Sep 07 '22 at 16:39
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    @DeanMacGregor Well, around here they have the smart meters, so it phones home for readings, and phones home when it thinks there's trouble. In my case the gas company agent was able to tell me the exact date it reported trouble... and it was 9 months prior... and nobody had been dispatched to deal with it. Which meant I had been paying a fake bill for 9 months. Brilliant... I say illegal because 9 months is excessive.. .and then they tell you "btw you now owe us $X and you have no way to prove otherwise so pay up or else..." - really scummy. – SnakeDoc Sep 07 '22 at 17:21
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    @SnakeDoc of course you could prove otherwise. See the amount of gas you used, and multiply by the price, and subtract the amount you already paid. You're (in theory) responsible for knowing how much you consume and then paying for it. You can't go to a restaurant, order off a menu with prices and then when you get the bill at the end, say it's crazy and you have no way to prove otherwise. – user253751 Sep 08 '22 at 19:17
  • @user253751 the smart meters don't even have a display to show you the actual readings anymore. it's literally impossible to measure your own gas usage and calculate the Therms used during some arbitrary duration. It's among the few items you pay for but never see and can never verify... – SnakeDoc Sep 08 '22 at 19:38
  • @SnakeDoc I assume it's legal to have a gasfitter install your own meter after the "official" one. Or, maybe the gas company would lose if challenged in court! That would be surprising but stranger things have happened. I wouldn't advise it, but if you want to tell the court they can't prove their meter isn't faulty... – user253751 Sep 08 '22 at 19:39
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    @user253751 perhaps, but that's absurd for a residential tenant... and there's no chance the gas company is going to accept your readings anyway. the problem here was the duration - 9 months is a very long time to know about a problem and not do something about it. After a reasonable amount of time, say 30 days, what they billed you for should be your only obligation - it's not my responsibility to maintain their meter or be afraid one day they might change their mind and bill you extra because they screwed up. the entire situation should be very illegal... – SnakeDoc Sep 08 '22 at 19:42
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    @SnakeDoc It is, however, your obligation to pay for the gas you buy. – user253751 Sep 08 '22 at 19:46
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    @user253751 No one disputes that. What is disputed is a company can say 9 months later, just kidding, you owe us more now due to some issue we knew about for 9 months and did nothing about. That's outrageous and unreasonable. – SnakeDoc Sep 08 '22 at 19:47
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    @SnakeDoc so you want free gas because you were billed incorrectly. Possibly, possibly not. Like I said, take it up in court. – user253751 Sep 08 '22 at 19:48
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    @user253751 I don't know what your beef here is, but nobody here is advocating for free stuff. The utility company screwed up, knew about it, and did nothing for 9 months, then expects people to cough up hundreds of dollars for a bill that's normally two digits at max. Further, there is no other business on the planet that can retroactively bill you huge amounts due to their own screw up nearly a year prior - and forcefully compel you to pay. It's crappy, and should not be legal. If the utility wants to get paid correct amounts, they should maintain their meters. It's that simple. – SnakeDoc Sep 08 '22 at 20:04
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    @SnakeDoc are you sure? I thought most utilities could do that. – user253751 Sep 08 '22 at 20:11
  • @SnakeDoc other businesses don't agree to let you buy a product on estimated usage rates and settle it up later... a gasoline stand shuts down and stops pumping gas when it detects its not working right; wouldn't be very convenient if the gas mains did that I think – mbrig Sep 09 '22 at 04:19
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    No-one read my water meter for several years, so I only paid the standing charge, thinking water was cheap, estimated consumption very little, based on hardly any consumption for the first year(not living in property). When finally read, company was convinced there was a huge leak. Took a while for it all to dawn, but I ended up re-paying over a 12 month period, with no penalties. – Tim Sep 09 '22 at 10:17
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    "There aughtta be a law!" <-- the 5 most dangerous words in the English language. – FreeMan Sep 09 '22 at 12:25
  • @SnakeDoc *there is no other business on the planet that can retroactively bill you huge amounts due to their own screw up nearly a year prior - and forcefully compel you to pay* You've obviously never had a bad experience with the U.S. healthcare system. – Steve Summit Sep 09 '22 at 14:59
  • @mbrig except it does! A gasoline pump does let you buy gas and then pay later. – user253751 Sep 14 '22 at 16:09
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In this answer, I'm assuming that your meter was previously read within the two months before your last bill, and that this discrepancy isn't a difference between estimated and actual usage that accumulated over years. It's not clear how you established this usage was billed over 8 days; it sounds like that's the time between the expansion tank installation and the next billing date, but since you didn't look at the meter when the tank was installed, that might be wrong.

I think it's hard to comprehend the amount of water we are talking about here. It's 3/4 acre-feet, enough to cover an acre with 9 inches, or a quarter-acre with 3 feet of water! 250,000 gallons is more water than my family uses in two years.

Wherever you live, I'd be somewhat surprised that a spike in demand equivalent to one hundred homes popping into existence would go unnoticed and unquestioned by both your water supplier and water treatment facility.

I would explain to the water company that it's not physically possible for them to supply water at that rate, and ask for your bill to be corrected. They might want to test or simply replace your meter. If they balk, ask them to find the leak and where the water is going. That is, nicely ask them to provide evidence of your consumption other than your meter, like water meter logs upstream and downstream of your home.

Regarding the expansion tank: an expansion tank is like a bottle; it has only one opening. At the bottom of the tank is a bladder filled with air. As cold water fills your water heater and is heated, it expands a tiny bit. Water is effectively incompressible, so that hot water needs more space. Rather than letting the pressure rise so much that all of your pipes stretch repeatedly and eventually break, the air bladder in the expansion tank is compressed. The small amount of water that enters the tank is pushed back out when the pressure drops.

The only path from from the expansion tank to the sewer is through the rest of your plumbing. Unless there's a visible leak from the tank, its net consumption of water is zero.

Unless the tank is flooding your home, it can't be responsible.

erickson
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    What do you think about the expansion tank? That's what the OP is asking about. – JACK Sep 07 '22 at 17:40
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    **I'd be somewhat surprised that a spike in demand equivalent to one hundred homes popping into existence would go unnoticed and unquestioned by both your water supplier and water treatment facility.** THIS. I once had a toilet whose flapper valve was failing. I procrastinated it for maybe a month as it worsened "okay, this weekend we'll fix this." I got a visit from techs saying they were gonna shut off my main if I'd not been there to answer the door. I was probably using an extra few gallons per hour--they notice. – zedmelon Sep 08 '22 at 20:36
  • My water company is a bit more easygoing, but at least as attentive. No one came to my door, but the company once notified me by letter that I probably had a slow leak at a toilet or other fixture, based on monitoring my water usage pattern (I guess at a pretty fine-grained level). And they were right: I had a leaky fill valve in one of my toilet tanks. – PellMel Sep 09 '22 at 22:25
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If you don't have a check valve after the meter then you could get fluctuations where water moves backwards and then again forwards and you are double billed. 250,000 gallons of water seems unthinkable from that kind of fluctuations though.

Fresh Codemonger
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    flowing backwards should be prevented by a check valve though – ratchet freak Sep 07 '22 at 13:14
  • As others have stated, it would be impossible to have that high of a reading in 8 days with all the faucets turned on, let alone generate that much back and forth through fluctuations. – rtaft Sep 09 '22 at 12:30
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Have you actually read your meter to see what the current usage is? That would be the first step in deciphering the problem. Does the meter show the same reading (or very close since you aren't actively using it) as the last invoice? A very simple explanation is that the meter reader accidentally added a leading digit to the reading. If that's the case, you can just call the utility company and they can fix it.

Our invoice shows both the current month and a small graph with usage for every month, along with the previous year. If yours doesn't, ask the utility for a statement that shows usage for the last year. This might show the typical usage and you can compare your current actual usage. This won't explain 250k gallons, but you can check the stream of usage (pun intended) to make sure they have been charging you over time.

GMisenar
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  • Also possible that they assume non-zero usage; if usage was 0, that could translate to the wrap-around reading for the meter. – Technophile Sep 10 '22 at 00:36