Outrageous Winter quarterly Water Bill

[Dominick Petrellese]

Thank you for adding me to your group! 

We are a retired couple, empty nesters, living in New Jersey. In February 2023 we received an outrageously large quarterly water and sewer bill from our municipal water utility for the winter period November 14, 2022 - February 9, 2023. The $1,400.00 bill reflects our usage to have been 624,000 gallons of water. We contacted the utility department in town immediately and the clerk suggested we check the numbers on the meter and walked us through doing that. The numbers were close to the reading on the bill, and the difference indicated that the water seemed to be flowing normally. The clerk confirmed this fact. She suggested that we must have had a leak or running toilets, leaking faucets, etc.

There was never a leak or breakage in our home during that time. Our plumbing fixtures are all in fine working order, nothing leaking or running. All of our outside water sources were turned off from inside in October. No one had access to our home during the times we were away. Our long time sole master plumber gave us a notarized letter stating that our plumbing is sound and no repairs were done in our home during this billing period.

To show good faith we paid the utility $200, the amount we paid for the same billing period a year ago. We feel this is probably more than we would have used considering we were away for several weeks during this time. We are disputing the remaining balance.

We were advised by the utility department to have the meter tested in order to dispute the bill. They removed the meter and sent it for a water flow test. The results indicated that the meter was running slowly during low water flow, resulting in a lower than normal billing. HA!

After several emails to the Mayor, Council, tax collector and utility department, we received a call from the Borough Business Administrator who insists that something happened that we are unaware of. Well maybe that something that we're all unaware of is that the meter, which has analog numbers, (and has since been replaced due to the fact of running slowly) went haywire mechanically. During this period PSE&G had been working in our town to update the gas meters both in the street and in our home. The gas meter is near the water meter in our basement and when they were done installing the new gas meter there was concrete all over the floor from drilling. Could the drilling have caused the meter to “jump”?

We have been monitoring our usage daily since the first call to the utility. Our water usage reads between 80 and 100 gallons daily.

All we are asking is that they apply common sense to this issue. The meter was never tested for mechanical problems. If we had a leak of this magnitude our home would sink or there would be serious internal damage. How can a plumbing problem just fix itself? We would appreciate any help or advice in helping us resolve this problem. After reading many posts on this great forum apparently this happens a great deal throughout the country and local municipalities are getting away with it. It's called LEGALIZED THIEVERY. Thank you in advance for your input.

Dom

[Greg Scott]

I sympathize with your problem.  From the city's perspective, they see these things happen frequently.  

We've had underground water leaks that have resulted in a large bill.  In a more extreme example, I have a friend that owned several rental condos in a master-metered complex.  At one point the water bills suddenly doubled and they could not figure out why.  The bill was thousands of dollars higher every month.  Eventually they paid to sub-meter every unit.  They discovered that one guy had a broken toilet that was stuck, constantly flushing (for about a year).  He finally fixed his toilet when he got a $5,000 water bill!