Recently, we had a water tank burst.
It was a small (25 litre) header tank, located in the room space, to provide mains pressure hot water to the kitchen and laundry areas.
We discovered there was a problem when I could hear water gushing which at first I thought was the people next door taking a very long and loud shower.
Going outside I found a waterfall pouring from the roof of the house.
We also noticed water coming into the dining room through the light fitting (never a good sign).
A quick trip into the roof area, locating the inlet to the tank and shutting it off resulted in the waterfall turning into a trickle and then stopping.
Stage 1 complete.
We were then without hot water to the kitchen or laundry.
No hot water in the laundry wasn’t an issue but not having any in the kitchen is surprisingly challenging especially when it comes to washing dishes.
We reverted to early last century technology, boiling water on the stove and then topping up the sink with cold water.
That works OK for a while but becomes tedious very quickly.
Stage 2 – fix it.
The options were to find a plumber and/or do it myself.
After checking out Bunnings I decided it was much more prudent (for all sorts of intelligent reasons like insurance complications if there was some other issue) to get someone else to do it.
After speaking with locals (including a builder) we resorted to the guy sitting outside in his truck with plumbing signs all over it.
We explained it to him, he inspected the problem, gave us a price, we got the OK to go ahead from the owners and the new tank was installed within a couple of days.
Problem solved.
Or so we thought.
The Ginormous Water Bill
We recently received an email from the home owner who was somewhat shocked at the water bill he’d just received.
According to this bill the usage had gone from an average of 370 litres per day to 2075.
Here’s an extract from the account.
According to this we went from using 33,300 litres over of 3 month period to 186,750 litres, a difference of 153,450 litres.
To put that into perspective a swimming pool of 25 metres long by 10 metres wide and averaging 1.5 metres deep contains 375,000 litres.
Domestic spas are generally in the range of 1,000 – 2,000 litres.
While not quite in the Olympic Pool class (standardly 50 x 25 x 2 metres ie 2,500,000 litres) we are talking about the equivalent of a reasonably sized domestic swimming pool pouring into the back yard.
You’d think we would have noticed something like that.
We didn’t.
Yes, there was a lot of water around but…
So now we’ve been assigned the mission of finding the missing pool.
Was it simply the water from the burst tank and we’re incredibly lucky we were home at the time to have kept the flooding to a minimum or is there a slow leak somewhere still going on.
We’ve become quite proficient at reading the water meter – OK that doesn’t take a lot of skill – even down to a single litre.
So far, we can’t find any evidence of a leak.
So where did half a swimming pool disappear to?