Quote:
Originally Posted by Dvogler
We had a high bill last month so we turned down the minutes it waters. We only water twice a week. The bill went higher this month. We used 17000 gallons of water. We ran all the zones to check the sprinkler heads and pressure. No idea why the bill even went higher. We had our neighbor to check our settings and he says it’s the same as his and he uses a lot less than we do. The water company is coming out to check the reading and to make sure everything looks good.
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You can read your own meter, you just need to find the box, open it, and lift the cover on the meter. They are activated by light so you may need to make sure it isn't shaded when you try to read it.
Your meter is probably not read on the first of the month. Depending on what days you water, you *might* have watered more days on this reading than last.
I have a small lawn with five zones and water for about 80 minutes. From my water bill it seems I use about 12gals/min or about 960gals each day that I water. In a normal month I use about 7,000gals which would mean seven or eight watering days.
17,000 seems very high, especially if your neighbor's is much less.
Something you might try:
- Find the meter and make sure it is not moving with no zones turned on
- Run each zone for two or three minutes and write down how much water is used
- Is there a zone that seems to be using much more water than the others?
- Can you use the gals/min that you observed and the number of minutes your zones run to get the amount of water on the bill?
Do you have a Hunter controller? I don't remember the exact term they use but they have settings for both Program A and Program B and both programs usually run. If you have this controller and somehow have both programs configured then it could be that you are watering much more than you think you are.