Anyone ever had a dodgy water meter?

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Got a new water meter several months ago, never had one before this. Am a FTB and am renovating the house with just family support, so no builders. The meter is in the house, and we've checked all/changed some of the pipework months ago. There's no external taps on the building. And most of all, nobody lives at the property. There is a shared main, but this is way before the meter.

Had my bill through, basically i've used loads. The meter reckons i've used 6000 litres in 8 days alone. There's a slight dribble from the one old toilet that's connected, but i've never even heard the toilet fill so it's massively slow.

Anyone experienced such an issue?
Looking for some ammo hopefully as water/energy companies are always unhelpful.

Thanks
 
Soldato
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The water company should be able to come to your house, isolate the flow to your house and check if the meter is still running when isolated.

Likely hood is that you have a leak though. Have you lifted the toilet to check the level of the leak?
 
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The water company should be able to come to your house, isolate the flow to your house and check if the meter is still running when isolated.

Likely hood is that you have a leak though. Have you lifted the toilet to check the level of the leak?

Sorry, i meant the toilet is leaking in the cistern and running into the bowl freely, rather than the pipe leaking. Unless you meant something else?

I'm going to turn off the mains at the stop tap and see what the meter does in the day when i'm there at the weekend, and also in the week when no one's there too.

It just doesn't make any sense to me as any significant leak in the property would've been evident i want to think. I picked up the property in November and it hadn't been lived in for at least a year prior to that. Currently there's no carpets, bare walls, electrics hanging out and some floor boards up. The only mains pipework is a short run to the upstairs bathroom (which we have the floorboards up to see it), with the newly made utility room still not properly plumbed in, and the kitchen is isolated as non existent still. Both kitchen and utility room are next door to the incoming mains which houses the boiler and water meter, so it's all compact. There's no hidden pipework to speak of as we changed around some walls in this area.

Thanks
 
Soldato
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Get the water company out they can sound the pipes from the meter into your property, I would be looking to isolate all pipework in the property and see if the meter is still showing flow.
 
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Leaks may not be apparent. I am in the process of getting a patio done and we found that the steel water main to the house was only a few inches underground. Overtime it had corroded and failed and had been leaking for a while. The leak was only apparent when the pipe was exposed and a small puddle appeared.

Never noticed it myself as not on a water meter, so no monetary impact.

So as others have said try to isolate the house and see if the meter in the road keeps ticking...
 
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Stating the obvious - I presume you can see the meter moving when you know you aren't using water?

6000l over 8 days is 750l a day

Presume some is real use so your 'dribble' in the toilet then probably covers the rest

Ps even at the 6000l it translates to around 0.5l a minute so rather small
 
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yeah we had a issue like that. Our water company decided that we'd used an additional 100,000 litres of water in the 6 months at the end of last year. that is 100,000 litres over and above our normal amount. we're on a meter so I started sending them the meter readings on a monthly basis which quickly saw our water bill reduce down to it's normal expected amount. No idea how they thought we'd used so much, nothing had changed in our water usage pattern. When I spoke to them all I initiall got was "well it sounds like you've had people staying over and using more water"... IN LOCKDOWN! clowns!
 
Soldato
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100,000 litres, that’s some serious in addition to what you normally would use.

edit: just checked my last bill was 63m3 so 63,000 litres.
 
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My mum had an issue with her toilet flush, it kept draining or something and she gave it a flush just before going away for 4 days holiday without realising. The water company charged over £400 for all the water that drained away. She’s in her 70’s so it came as a shock.
 
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