Our 6 monthly water bills from Severn Trent have been creeping up and up over the past few years. We didn’t think too much of it at first, rising prices and all that, but our most recent bill was £650 for 6 months! It seems this is around twice the national average, as is our water consumption. Only my wife and myself live here at our small bungalow and we don’t do anything unusual with water. No dishwasher, no car to wash, don’t water the garden or jet wash the drive or patio. Enquiries to nearby neighbours revealed that their bills are all in the region of half of what ours are.
I performed a leak test as described on Severn Trent’s website and I’m satisfied that there is no leak in our property. I contacted Severn Trent the other week and they sent an engineer out the following day. He also did a leak test and pronounced no leak in our property. He was as baffled as we are. Contacted Severn Trent again and they said the next step was to replace the meter in case it is faulty. The engineer however said that these meters never over read. If they go faulty they just don’t work at all.
Had the meter replaced today so we’'ll see what happens. The engineer commented that it was an extremely high reading on the meter for the 10 years that it had been fitted.
We’ve put our payment for the bill on hold and refused to pay until the matter has been properly investigated by Severn Trent. This on the advice of the engineer. So I’m wondering, if the meter wasn’t faulty and the new one continues to give high readings then where do we go from here? Any ideas or experiences welcomed.
Water is charged by the cubic metre. 1 cubic metre is 1000 litres. I would read the meter then monitor your use for a week, estimating where you can’t measure. This will give a good idea of what you are using and may answer the question of why the bill is high, or if you have a problem.
Is there another property nearby? In the past the water feed was often shared between several properties and this is often forgotten when water meters are fitted, until someone discovers that their water meter is metering their neighbour’s use as well as their own. The neighbour wouldn’t have a meter so would be paying the unmetered tariff, which is why this can happen. Of course if someone tests whether there is a leak, they will find there isn’t one, unless the neighbour is using water at the time of the check.
In our own case, we found that our water supply was shared between us and our next door neighbour, that’s two detached houses with a 5 metre gap between them. Because it’s all underground, you don’t know until there is a reason to think about it.
I decided to pay for a new connection to the water main, which meant that we came off the shared supply pipe. Then we had a meter fitted.
It’s an internal meter - no shared supply. Engineer who visited verified no shared supply. Only possibility was something really bizarre such as a spur off to our neighbour’s semi after our meter! Just for completeness I checked with our neighbour running both kitchen and bathroom taps and no movement at all of our meter.
My daughter’s water supply actually runs under her semi-detached neighbours kitchen floor, so it would be possible to have an internal meter in his house that metered her use as well. So not necessarily that bizarre!
But I agree your bath and kitchen taps test probably counts that possibility out.
No the meter and the join to the meter had come apart
It sounds very wrong, you can possibly check your previous usage and go back to the water company , saying that your usage has not changed , why the increase
We are with Severn Trent. Ours and four other properties had individual meters 400 yrds away by the side of the main road. It took us 20 years to work out that 3 of the meters were connected to the wrong properties. After a lot of hassle and confusion we now have our meter in the house. We now keep a close eye on it. I think we are at about £60 per month, but lower in winter and higher in summer due to plant irrigation.
He took the face plate off the meter and apparently there is a small valve or something that vibrates or moves if any water is flowing. It was completely still so he pronounced that there was definitely no leak.
Do you have historical records of water consumption that you can graph? If so you should spot any untoward increases in usage. If there are non then either the meter is not working correctly or the water charge price increases are more than expected.
Here in France it’s slightly different in that the water company is only responsible up to the meter which js sited on the boundary of the property. After that any pipes under ground across the land and to the property are my responsibility. We did have a leak for some months before noticing there was a wet patch of ground developing even in summer. Dug it out and found the leak and repaired it. I contacted the water company and complained that their automatic meter reading hadn’t identified excessive water use and what was the point of them having a remote reading facility. They agreed and refunded 3 months water charge. A better result than I expected.
It’s an internal meter in the kitchen. Your water bill for 6 months would be around £300 less than ours! In line with all our neighbours. I pointed this out again today in a ‘phone conversation with Severn Trent in which I arranged for them to read the new meter after two weeks. The girl I spoke to was very helpful and understanding and after checking our account agreed that the amount of usage recorded was unusually high. It’s extremely frustrating. As I explained on the ‘phone, if we were doing something to acount for it like running a garden sprinkler several hours a day then we would just stop. But there’s absolutely nothing we are doing that could possibly explain it. The engineer who originally came out said that they once had a case of high usage and it turned out that the person, who lived alone, was sadly suffering from dementia and was leaving taps turned on. I assured him that wasn’t the case with my wife and I. But then I suppose we wouldn’t realise it would we?!!!
Our bills are on line and only accessible as far back as 2023 due to a change in their accounts system. I’ve requested paper bills dating back to 2016 which is when we moved in. The request for those was a whole story in itself. They specified a household utlity bill as proof of ID. Emailed them a copy of our latest water bill. No good. One of their own bills doesn’t count, despite showing our names and address, which is the address our account is registered to! They can’t send the copies of the bills to that address without independant proof that we are who we say we are. Even though the bills relate to the account registered at that address. I know all about data protection, but honestly, how will the data not be protected if it’s sent to the account holder’s address?
So there was no leak at that point in time. Can you be certain that there are no buried branches on the pipe after the meter, that could go outside your house, either to a neighbour or an outside tap?
My advice would be to take readings every 24hrs for a week or so and see does it seem to tie in with your general usage, also check the meter last thing at night and first thing in the morning and see if water is being consumed somehow during the night. As said above the meter reads cubic meters of water so 1000L and if it’s the same as what I have the last 3 digits on the meter, normally in red, read litres
