omg the first water bill

[Need4Camaro]

Yea, I had a feeling there were connection / deposit fees. That was the first thing that came to mind when you mentioned it was your first bill.

$150 is fine for a 3k squarefoot home.

[riaelise]

Our water/waste water bills during summer months can be up to $400. Older irrigation system, half acre lot, water said lot three times per week.

This year the bills were more modest.

Our gas is on the higher side during winter months. The reason explained to me is that the price of natural gas has gone up. 3700 sq foot home, normal usage.

[ScoPro]

Yes, natural gas prices at the well head have gone waaay up in the past year.

[dicipher]

According to my lawn guy, this time a year all you need is once a week. How much are you watering in each zone? I think he has ours set for 7 minutes for most and slightly longer on maybe 3 of the zones. Are you over watering?

[Trainwreck20]

We don't water all all for the winter, starting after the first cold snap (October or November, generally) until it warms up in the spring and stops raining - so sometimes as late as May or June before we start full watering again.

[atxcio]

Originally Posted by Trainwreck20

We don't water all all for the winter, starting after the first cold snap (October or November, generally) until it warms up in the spring and stops raining - so sometimes as late as May or June before we start full watering again.

Yup. Lawn requires very little water when it is dormant.

[DashRiprock]

As others have said, toilet leaks add up quick. Usually, but not always, you can tell by listening if the valve is closing all the way. There are some colored tablets you can drop in the tank that will indicate if it's leaking into the bowl but in my experience those are a pain and you'll never get rid of the color.

Another way to see if there are any leaks, toilet or otherwise, is to make sure all faucets are off and watch your meter to see if the needle is still moving, even slightly. On mine there's a little triangle shaped needle inside the bigger gauge that measures minute movements of water through the meter. If it is, and you can't find the source in the house, it might be an underground leak. Since your house is new you'd likely have some recourse from the builder.

Sprinkler systems are notoriously hard to program and I've had mine go wonky more than once and suddenly do things like water every day instead of once a week or get stuck on one station 600 minutes instead of 6. I ended up clearing all my settings and now I manually run the cycle as needed. I keep it completely off the rest of the time, I don't trust the auto settings any more.

This doesn't likely apply to you but every so often an unusually large number of residents of the same neighborhood in Austin gets slammed with $1000+ water bills, usually in a fall month. The city always blames it on sprinkler systems or leaks but what's really happening is that they only read the meters every 3rd month or so and do a calculation based on that. The problem is the cumulative reading triggers you to reach the higher tier rates which you likely would not have reached had your meter been honestly read each month. To my knowledge the city has never admitted to this and I don't understand why there's never been a class action lawsuit, but that's a different discussion.