If you do not want to read the “how did I get here?” Scroll down to ANSWER below. I am an off-site owner living in California and I purchased my first small community in Rural Minnesota with a master meter and 2,000’ linear feet of main water lines located 8’ under the ground. Rent was $225/month and included water. We won’t get into all my bad decisions, but depending on the winter the frost line can drop 3-6’ below ground. Additionally, I have a water table that is as close as 3’ down depending on the time of the year which means water leaks dissipate into the water table - they don’t surface . Being I have plastic lines located 8’ underground with a high water table, sound listening does not work. After I did my due diligence and purchased the community I discovered several items.
1.) In this small town I learned that the City does not have a official water meter reader - all the residents call/email in their own readings. What this means is that even though I obtained the meter readings from the City to compare them with the readings I obtained from the seller of the community they looked perfect - right? FYI…being this was my first community it looked like my 15 residents were using about 3,300 gallons/per month or about 50k gallons total which I was told was within a nominal range.
2.) 2 months after purchasing the park with fifteen homes I learned that I was using 150k gallons of water (more than the local high school). After a closer inspection I discovered that the previous owner installed a “jumper” before the main water meter that looped around to the supply side of the community. It was not there when I inspected the property and even if it was I probably would not have noticed it, but we figured out what the previous owner was doing when we started investigating what turned out to be three major leaks and several minor leaks. What this means is half the water was going through the meter and the other half was going around the meter and none of this made a difference because the City does not have an official water meter reader to take readings or inspect meters.
Due to the winter cycle,. waiting for the frost to dissipate I only have about 4-6 working months so it took about 2 years to fix my problem.
ANSWER: I did everything mentioned above plus after installing sub-meters on all the homes, I worked with the City to only charge me for the water/sewer fees for the water going through the sub-meters and they forgave that excess water fees going through the master-meter as long as I was actively trying to locate the leak. I always kept the City updated on my progress so they new we were actively trying to solve the problem. As I stated, I installed sub-meter’s on all the homes and yes many of the homes themselves had leaks, but when I started charging the residents for the water those leaks went away quickly. The 50k gallons of water I initially thought my residents were using turned out to be about an average of 28k gallons. I also replaced the master meter to eliminate that as a problem source. In my community the main water line loops around and then back to itself and I already had to curb-stops (shut-off valves) on both ends of the loop so I could turn off both valves and isolate one-half of the community from the other. After doing this I would take a master meter reading and resident meter readings over a 4-6 hour interval then take a second set of readings to compare. This allowed me to see which side of the community was losing water and by how much and I was able to locate and repair all but one major leak through process of elimination.
Then, in my second year as I had one leak left I could not find, one morning over a cup of coffee in California I thought why don’t I just install more curb-stops (at $800/curb-top) which was cheaper than digging up the entire line and then through process of elimination I could isolate the leak. I knew which of two sides of my initial curb-stops the leak existed so I split the difference between those to and installed a third curb-stop. Now I had curb-stops 500’ apart and we new we were searching in the right location because there was a fast current where the escaping water was using the water lines as an underground channel/creek/river versus just surfacing. Once we new which side to work on we split the difference again to dig our forth hole (now 250’ spaced apart) and we got lucky as the water was very strong and we ended up within 3’ of where a secondary line (leading to the riser of a home) where it had connected to the primary had broken away so a full 3/4" line freely flowing into the water table was finally repaired.
As a side note, I have worked on other very tricky leaks and another option other than listening and installing curb-stops is finding a leak detection company that injects helium into the water line and then the use highly sensitive “sniffers” to locate the leak. Basically, wherever there is a leak, the helium escapes and they can mark that location as a starting point. Hope this helps!