Water bill

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Can I ask what your monthly water bill is? Ours is £100 per month, which is I think is crazy. 2 adults & 2 teens. I don’t think we have a leak. We have turned off the indoor water valve and left it for about an hour and the meter didn’t move. The water company sent us a high usage report and they claim we are using the equivalent of 9 baths a day of water. We are not doing this! What can we do?

I pay £280 or so every 6 months, November and May. We are not on a meter. Would probably be more if we were.

I cannot fathom how ours is so high

We pay the same, 2 adults 2 small children - we do both have a bath every night.

I’m sorry to hear yours is so high as well. We have showers instead of baths.

How long do the showers take?

We pay £72 a month which I think is shockingly high considering I used to pay £25 a month a few years ago. Small 3 bed house, two adults one child.

Which water company are you with?

it does sound a lot as we didn’t get that high with 6 adults/teenagers in the house.

South East Water

Just gone up last week to £41 a month.
Not on water metre. Have a pond and over half an acre of garden.
With Severn Trent

How many cubic metres a day or week?

Have you a dripping tap or loo?

Make sure everything is turned off but with stop cock open and check the meter after an hour.

Water escaping into a floor void can be difficult to see.

ours was £600 every 6 months. The water company contacted us and said we were a high user could they check for leaks. I was sceptical as 3 teens in the hsoue, play sports, multiple showers a day etc. They found that both toilets upstairs had a slow drip leak down the back of the toilet due to corroded plastic part. They fixed them for free and now its back down to £400 every 6 months. I was amazed how much difference a small constant drip made.

There seems no rhyme or reason as to how they assess the non-metered rates. We're ST and our (new, heavily increased) bill is approx £475 for the year.

A family member who lives in a comparable house 2 minutes from us somehow has a rateable value much higher than ours and her bill (also unmetered) is almost exactly twice as much as ours.

We've had letters through saying that they're installing a meter for each property at the roadside, to help them to 'monitor supply and demand', but it's obvious which way the wind is blowing: you can keep on paying unmetered for now, but I'm sure that will change before too long.

Then, once everybody is metered, I expect the potential cost savings for choosing a meter will vanish completely when there's no alternative - just like the zero-rated VED 'carrot' is now disappearing on electric cars.

Ours is a lot... we pay £120 / month!

But we are southern water. and had a 40% hike!

Need to go look and check we have no leaks

So have there been any sanctions or reparations demanded from the water companies for pocketing millions for their shareholders that were needed to maintain and repair the essential networks for years, as if they were actually profits - or have they just been allowed to get away with it, and now send the bills rocketing to make us pay (again) for it?

Moreover, I've no issue with capitalism and market forces when it relates to a luxury product that people can freely choose to take or leave; but how did we ever end up in this position where a series of monopolies are making big profits from a basic essential such as water?

Ours was similar in our last house on s meter. We moved and now it's 35 a month, unmetered.

We had a high water bill after moving two houses down the road. We turned off water at the main stopcock and the meter didn’t go round which was good news. However we then turned the main stopcock back on and turned each individual toilet and shower off where we could. Then one person stood by the meter and the other person turned individual items back on. We found one toilet is slowly leaking-DH can prob fix this. One toilet however when it was turned on caused the meter to keep spinning quite fast, we had a plumber out to look at this one and it is constantly overflowing. So thankfully not onto the floor but still using a lot of water. This one is turned off and will stay off until it can be fixed.

Obviously, leaving leaks unidentified and unfixed for a long time is far from ideal - as the water companies have now eventually reluctantly woken up to after all of these years themselves - but it's always been my concern that switching to metered billing could potentially leave us with a colossal, untraceable bill if there was an enormous hidden underground leak somewhere inside our property boundary.

Even if it were realised what must be happening, would the water company be that eager to bother fixing it if it meant that we were paying them for all the wasted water anyway?!

I pay about £500 a year. That includes,
8 or 9 short showers a week,
3 or 4 washing machine runs
2 dishwasher runs
Loo flushing for two people at work/school normal hours
General usage for cooking, teeth cleaning etc.

How does that match up, OP?