Water Leak Advice - supposedly using over 26 litres and hour, even at night!

[slfk3]

We're with Anglian Water. They put smart meters on in January and we received the new bill in March. Suddenly our water usage has tripled, increasing steadily since the new water meter and we are now supposedly using 987 litres a day. Both myself and the man they send yesterday have done the turning off of the stop cock inside and the meter stops reading so they've now said it's on us and the cause its an internal leak. We live in a bungalow and I've looked/listened/sniffed everywhere and can see no sign of a leak. In looking at the last years bill with the old meter, it is possible that this leak began sometime last March/April. A small hidden leak, I could understand, but am struggling to understand how we could be leaking a good 500-800 litres a day(based on subtracting our standard usage from the last five years) since January this year, or possibly last year, and show absolutely no sign? And shouldn't have Anglian Water alerted us sooner? They've given my neighbours notice for using 3 litres more a day and yet this was the first we were told anything.

Does anyone have anything I ought to check/isolate while I wait for the detection people to come Monday?

Thanks in advance!

Check your loo! If the internal fittings aren’t right it can constantly fill the cistern and discharge down the pan without you noticing.

Do you share a water supply with anyone else? It took us months with Thames Water telling us that we were using 3 times the expected amount of water to find this out.

We live in a terraced house and the water comes in from outside travels up our water pipes and then either goes through a water pipe on the left in our loft (which provides next door) or to a water pipe on the right (which provides our water).

Definitely start with your toilet(s), particularly if they are the modern flush type. We had exactly this problem last year and didn't realise until a sudden jump in the water bill. We actually got a refund from the water company for the excess amount.

Do you have house insurance as you might be able to claim (if the leak isn't at all obvious)? Some policies will pay for leak detection too.

Some toilets are designed to have a constant flow of water through them but this normally would be visible in the bowl.
Do you have a water tank in the loft this could have a faulty ball valve and depending on how it is plumbed in could be draining out down the down pipe instead of an overflow.

The same if the water has a water pump and the water tank is in a cupboard.

Thanks, I checked the loos first, they are all fine. Insurance will click in after I pay the £600 excess for the detection. :(
For perspective, for a family of six Anglian Water estimate an annual maximum usage for a family of five of 199 m3, but at the rate we are invisibly leaking we are double that, and have only five people with modern eco-fittings on all points of water consumption. I'm struggling to see how that could be happening and not show up somewhere and wondered if anyone else had a similar experience.

No, no water tanks anywhere either.

have you checked all of the valves on the boiler/water heater?

When you say you checked the loos what did you exactly check and how?

I've had this happen to people i know twice recently. Both anglian water. In both cases it was the toilet.

Apparently it you put toilet paper at the back of the bowl it will give you an idea of if its leaking. Its often silent and not visible.

If you have to pay an excess of £600 for leak detection i'd call a plumber in first to check the obvious. They'll have see it a few times i'm aure!

I put loo roll under the rim where the water comes out of the cistern and waited to see if it got wet. Just like the Anglian Water guy did again yesterday.

Had a new boiler fitted last month. What would I check on it? It's a combi, and the water usage predates it.
I've turned off the water softener as of 7 AM and am monitoring to see if that is anything to do with it. Even with it off between 7-12 it says we used 197 litres, no showers, just toilets/washing up a bit from breakfast, so it doesn't seem to be the culprit.

Is the meter still running when everything is turned off? If not you've either not turned everything off or there's a leak.

If the meter stops turning when everything is off, then you can fill up buckets to check that it's recording what you expect.

have you tried calibrating the meter? e.g. turn everything else off, read it, run the tap and fill maybe 5 x 1litre bottles of water and then read it again

It may be under the front door? I've seen this.

I will try the calibrating thing. I turned the hourly reading thing on and it shows we still use 26-28 litres an hour all night when everyone is asleep.

Under the front door? We've no pipes there but I can see how that could be the case if the water came into the property that way.

I have the same and with Anglian Water too!
Mine was about 26 litres an hour through the night and we replaced something on our toilet and it's since been showing between 0 and 3 litres per hour at all times.
We've had Anglian Water out who couldn't find the leak and replaced the meter in case it was that - no change.
Called up Homeserve external team - couldn't find anything
Called up Homeserve internal plumbing team - can't find anything.
Now waiting for someone else to come round with infrared tools etc to see if they can find it.

Without proving we've got a leak Anglian Water won't put our direct debit down. We're paying £85 per month , they tried to put it up to £120 a month which I managed to stop.

Driving me mad.

Anything in your garden? Maybe where you have hoses connected to an outside tap so that the actual leak or drip is happening away from the source?

@Yearendjoy how weird! That sounds the same, averaging 26 an hour all night. I’m a bit nervous that I’m going to be out the £600 leak detection excess but still have no leak detected. They hiked my bill from £57/m to £147/m. Who is homeserve?
Leak detection people scheduled for Monday now. It is bloody maddening!!!!

No leak on external tap either.

Were you on unmetered water before your smart meter, or just a regular manual-read meter?

If you had a manual meter before then it's a bit strange that your usage has suddenly increased if your plumbing system hasn't. I suppose your old meter was probably only read once in 6 months, but you can take your last two 6-monthly actual readings to work out your actual daily consumption. If nothing in your water system has changed, it should be the same as post smart-meter.

You mentioned a water softener, that often has a back-flushing process that can use quite a lot of water. But a combi boiler shouldn't be any different to a non-combi boiler - just that you swap refilling the storage tank with direct feed through the boiler. But your usage is basically the same.

You mention some numbers that are a bit unclear...
26l/hr x 24 = 624l/day = 0.624m3/day x 365 days = 228m3/year
That's not so far off the suggested 199m3/year. Is that what you were using before, or what is measured now? Or is that the difference, the estimated loss?

If you are really losing 5-800l/day - that's lot of water to be losing! Think about what 1m3 looks like, 1m x 1m x 1m of water. I think you'd struggle to not be aware of that much, even if the loo was running constantly, 800l is like filling 5-8 bathtubs, per day! Even if it were leaking into the ground, you would notice that the ground was absolutely waterlogged.

This is quite an interesting thread: https://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&f=207&t=2068273

Also this one: https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/6459000/faulty-smart-water-meter which suggests that the main reasons are:

• Internal leak of water - usually a toilet cistern silently overflowing. If your toilet has its own stopcock, try turning just that off
• Leak between an external meter and house - easily checked by shutting off main water stopcock, or shutting the house stopcock and seeing if the smart meter stops, or not.
• 'Your' meter supplying another property

Homeserve are a company that I bought insurance with. They send regular letters to my house asking me to take up insurance for stuff like this and never took it up before. I thought I would now and they're now looking into it. Bit weird that nobody can find any trace of a leak.

We had a similar situation when we moved into a new house and eventually discovered that when the meter outside the property had been replaced that there was a slight leak in the pipe work where the water pipe on 'our land' had been incorrectly attached to the meter. It took several months to resolve, requiring lots of persistence and largely came down to one helpful contractor quickly sorting what many others had failed to. We clocked up a huge bill in the process and the water company even wrote to ask enquiring if we had a swimming pool. I wish! Fortunately we were able to claim against the water companies leak scheme so didn't have to pay. I hope you manage to get it sorted.

I had a leak and a letter from Anglian Water. I can't remember how much water was leaking but it was all day and all night. I knew what the issue was, I'd just been lazy at getting it sorted and didn't realise the extent of the wastage. It was something in the toilet cistern that needed replacing, as it was constantly filling up and then doing little flushes. Got a local plumber to fix it and then got a letter saying no more leaking.

Have you checked that the serial number on the meter is correctly assigned? In the first home we purchased we thought we had a leak. Turns out we were being billed for the house next door.

We are with Anglian water and I just looked at the hourly chart and when we are in bed usage is 0, yours shouldn't be 26-28 when you are in bed, you can see on ours when we go to the loo at night because it's about 9 litres. How old is your house, have you got the blue water pipe or the old lead pipes under the house, it sounds like it's under the house somewhere. Our usage for two is about 230 litres/day but we are retired so using water a lot during the day

When we started renovating our property we had the old boiler and water tank removed, and a new combi-boiler re-sited in our loft.

We were thrilled with the improvement in water pressure in our shower below it. Fast forward at least six months and we had a huge leak under our floor boards, caused by the previous owner employing cowboy plumbers, who when they fitted a shower, crimped two water pipes that were no longer needed instead of sealing them with the proper end caps. The added pressure opened up the crimping.
We couldn’t see the huge leak, as it was totally hidden under the shower tray, but we could hear gushing water.
Sometimes the leak is hidden, I mention our problem incase that is an area where a leak could hide…
Good Luck, I hope your problem is quickly found and resolved.

Thanks @filka the 800 L/day is excess, above what we used on average the last five years/day. Very aware that is an enormous amount of water, hence the frustration.
the pistons thread was interesting! They has a lot of our road and pavements up in the last year or so doing the gas, internet and water pipes so I am suspicious of that as well. Between our meter and where the pipe goes along the pavement and bends towards the house they did something as you can still see the repair in the pavement.
The other thing I don’t understand is why the “leak” is increasing, February’s average daily was just under 900 L, March has just registered as 986 L/day.

And yes, it should be 0 at night, totally agree. House is 50/ build and we renovated five years ago and converted garage three years ago. The only place I can think water could be leaking and not be detected would be the pipes under the floor that connect to the shower room in the extension, but that would mean there was water on the old concrete floor underneath pitching toward the road and I would have thought water in that amount would at least make the walls damp either inside the room or outside?

thanks for all the tips everyone!