Faulty Valve causing HUGE water bill

aguynameddarryl

Just spoken to Thames Water for her (and they seemed far to quick to give me her account details - I gave no information which isn't freely available in the public domain...not that I'm complaining this time).

They last got a good meter reading in December they tell me.

Just found that they have a leak allowance form, so have requested one of those too.

macman

So her DD must surely have been hiked following that reading-and dramatically so. If not, the leak has developed since.
I suggest you log on (or register) for the online account and then you should be able to see the full read history-that may give you an idea of when the consumption spiked up.

keystone

Inevitably it'll be a condensing boiler on a new build which means a sealed system so it can't be the PRV on a boiler because she'd be forever repressurising it.

So leaking PRV system with "a water tank with an immersion heater" suggests an unvented cylinder in which case it makes a certain amount of sense as it can't be a boiler leak.

It can't possibly be a tap or toilet overflow either as has been suggested. Even if the true loss is one tenth of that which Cardew has calculated over 18 months that still 180 litres a day being lost!! Even Thames Water ought to be able to work out thats a total nonsense and flies in the face of credulity.

Much more to this than apparently meets the eye.

Cheers

matelodave

If its an expansion valve then she's probably got a pressurised water system.

If so, there will be an expansion vessel somewhere together with a pressure limiting valve and an expansion valve which should vent either to the outside (so there might be water running down the outside wall of her flat) or via a device called a tundish which might discharge into the waste somewhere.

When a tundish is installed it should be visible somewhere in the pipework close to the tank and is designed so that it allows you to see the water flowing through it and to do something about it - it looks a bit like this http://www.mcalpineplumbing.com/tun-dish.html

I like keystone's thinking that Thames Water should be able to see that something is wrong but unfortunately they don't do anything about it. They would argue that you should check your meter occasionally or notice water coming out of places that it shouldn't.

Fortunately that's what I do, and discovered a leak that had probably been going for 5-6 weeks leaking about 1 cubic metre a day under my drive, so it wasn't visible - Anglian Water charge about £3.15 cu/m for water & sewerage and credited me with £108 which is about right. I now check a bit more frequently