When I bought the little blue house. I had it inspected but as you know the Inspector missed everything including the sprinklers. I received Warnings for 5 months, usages of 45,000 gallons of water for an empty 2/2 villa and a $300 consistently water bill of which I had to pay. I slowly replaced things but this is what I should have done in the first 5 days to eliminate the problem completely. I replace all the old sprinkler heads, the never hooked up rain sensor, pulled the gages( sprinkler cylinders) up out of the ground so they were visible because they were leaking underneath, and last of all, the sprinklers were set to go on too often. It was a combination of all these things that equaled 45,000 gallons. Let me break it down.
1. Every time your sprinklers cycle they uses apx 10,000 gallons (you do the math)
2. The rain sensor is on top of your house, it stops the sprinklers from coming on, by law it has to be on, unfortunately some, like mine, were never hooked up (17 years ago)
3. The cylinders control the sprinklers coming on and off. You can tap them to come on and say see, they are OK. They re located in the box in the ground. To see if they are leaking underneath would take a magician. It would be best to just raise them up our of the ground. It is suer easy to do the plant pretty plat in from, now you can see wait is happening with your system.
4. The sprinkler heads- they now have energy efficient heads. You should replace them anyway. It is easy. it is impossible to tell whether they are leaking, even small amounts. Even new ones can leak. So just emplace them with the new kind.
5. A PS. Check the donuts. Lawn mowers weight sometimes crush the sprinkler heads. While checking I found that the weed wacker cut halfway through the cable line so I saved a future problem. I hoped this helped. It took me 5 months to solve this problem. If I new all this I could of solved it in 5 days.
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Originally Posted by doster
We have a court yard villa and are part timers. I spent 2 nights there within the last month. Got a notice from the VCDD utilities of extreme water usage. Meter reads we used 23,670 gallons of water in one month. I took 2 showers and the sprinkler system has been on. My father in law went over and looked at everything and can find no evidence of a leak. Our usual reading is maybe 900 gallons a month. I plan on calling today and getting them to check the meter. Has anyone else had this problem?
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