Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Plugging the Leaks

This weekend I plugged a leak in our budget, literally. We had a toilet with a faulty flapper, so handle jiggling was necessary to get the flapper to close and let the tank fill back up. Eventually jiggling didn't work any more and removing the lid to tap the flapper down was required. Even then, the flapper didn't seal completely and there was a constant stream of water running down one side of the toilet bowl and the annoying sound of slightly running water constantly audible.

We'd been seeing our water bill creep up a little at a time, but told ourselves it was the watering of the garden or other things we were doing that was making it rise. A huge water bill came as a result of leaving the outside hose running for a day or two after forgetting to turn it off in the evening, and we suddenly became much more diligent about our water usage.

After plugging all the wasteful water habits except this annoying tiny (it seemed) fix, we expected the water bill to be down significantly - at least as low as it had been this time last year, when there was no garden watering being done. But while it was much lower than the forgotten hose month, it was still high for our average. So the hubster did a little sleuthing. No water was being used (except the leaking toilet) and he went to check the meter. It was spinning around out of control with the amount of water that was being used!

Needless to say, that fix was processed within the hour. After the new, improved, and functional flapper was in place, he checked the water meter again -- even with the dishwasher going, it was only moving at a trickle compared to before. YAY! Hopefully next month our water bill will be much, much lower and our checkbook will be much happier.

What tiny fixes have you been letting go because they seem too insignificant?

1 comment:

JW said...

Love your blog. I've added it to my blog roll and subscribed to read it regularly