[dbussone]

Originally Posted by JerryLBell

In the last two months, my water (and amenities) bill jumped to $300 and then to $350. Ouch. My yard is pretty bloody small. It's 6,000 square feet, but when you take out the house (1,900 square feet), the lanai, the garage and the driveway, I figure it has to drop to less than half that. So divide the 30,000 gallons the water bill claims the house used for irrigation by the 3,000 or so square feet of actual watered yard and that's about 10 gallons per square foot for just last month. That works out to 16 inches of water. Somehow I think that's a bit much. Since I'm not yet retired and don't live in that house, I've got our property management company checking to see if the irrigation has been set to something crazy by the renters (which I kind of doubt as they're a great couple from south Florida and probably know a LOT more about irrigation systems than I do). I also call the water company to come check the meter, which they didn't seem all that interested in doing. They pointed out that the water use was the same a year ago. Well, a year ago the house had just been finished and they were putting in sod and probably watering like crazy. That shouldn't be the case anymore. Hopefully the water usage (real or otherwise) will come down for the next bill. Ideally, it's a meter error and I'll get a refund. And in a perfect world, I'll also win the lottery. Hey, shoot for the stars!

We had a significant bill for the first year we moved in. When we added landscaping we found out that a 3/4 inch diameter feed line had been buried but not capped. Our bill was more than cut in half when that was corrected. We live in a corner lot and now use about 19,000 gallons per month - and the water department still complains about that.