Please read this first...

If you want to know what I'm on about in the shortest time then please read the introductory first post and my current action plan. Comments are very welcome. And if you like this blog, please tell a friend. Thanks!

Tuesday 23 October 2007

Have we sprung a leak!?

In the past couple of months I've allowed the time being readings of the water and electricity meters to stretch out to about once a fortnight. Our consumption of both has been fairly consistent so there didn't seem much point in religiously getting out there every morning.

My previous reading was on the 13th of October and the figures for the preceding 18 days were a little high but nothing extraordinary: 7.3kWh electricity and 347L of water per day.

This morning, ten days later, there's something amiss. Electricity use has dropped back a touch to 6.9kWh per day, but water has shot up to an incredible 507L per day! That's 1.6kL of excess consumption and I just can't imagine where we might have used so much water. Got me wondering about a leak.

The other factor is the new solar water heater: it has a valve which opens under conditions of excess heat/pressure and I'm wondering how much water is being lost that way. I'll go and stick a bucket beneath the outlet (which is a bit of a risk, actually... bucket of really hot water just sitting there...) and try to get a feel for whether it's a significant amount.

Looks like I'll be reading the meters every day for a little while as I try to figure this out.

1 comment:

Minni Mum said...

Yikes! You would *have* to know if you'd suddenly doubled your water use, so I hope you can find that leak ASAP!