Check that your water bill is actually yours!

trekker2002

A few weeks ago I got my Water Bill telling me that my direct debit was to increase from £54 a month to £84. Such an incredible increase made me get out my old bills and check consumption. I discovered that our household water usage was increasing year on year since 2009 ( the earliest bill I still had), despite the fact that our household size has decreased from 5 to 3 over the same timescale.

So I duly contacted Anglian Water and was told to run some checks by turning off the stopcock at the meter, in the house etc. and seeing what happened. So lifted the cover on the meter, checked the number agreed with the bill and turned off the stopcock. Our taps continued flowing but on checking next door theirs had gone off! Conclusion, we have been paying for next doors water supply and they for ours, probably since the houses were built in 1998! Anglian Water are sending an engineer to verify it and will be recalculating our bill, which I expect to show that they owe use some hundreds of pounds.

So if concerned at a rising water bill, don't just check the meter number on your bill, actually check that it is your meter by turning off the supply at the meter and turning your tap on.

Cardew

There have been many posts about wrongly connected water meters - often in flats - and also the same for gas/electricity.


What meter number is on your bill? your actual meter or neighbour's? It could be either.


It will be interesting to see how Anglian deal with this situation. Under statute they can go back 6 years.


If the occupants of either house haven't changed it will be easy to work out liability. However I doubt if your neighbour will have to pay for the additional water. He can argue that he would have taken steps to reduce consumption if he had known he was using so much water.

trekker2002

Anglian water man came on Thursday and checked the meters. We are indeed paying for the wrong supply as the meter number on our bill is actually next doors meter. They will be writing to us.