Sun City residents baffled by water bill spikes

In a single month, Sun City resident Alice Cella used enough water to fill a swimming pool.

At least that’s what her latest bill from the Beaufort-Jasper Water and Sewer Authority indicates.

Cella said she was shocked when she received her March water bill and was charged for using 20,800 gallons — 10 times the amount she used the previous month.

“I have a very normal routine, and there was absolutely no change in that routine in terms of my water usage,” she said earlier this week.

She contacted the water utility and was told the spike in usage could be the result of a “hidden leak,” Cella said.

“I’ve walked every inch of my property; it’s bone dry,” she said. “There are no wet spots or evidence of any standing water.”

Given that it was February, Cella wasn’t using sprinklers to water her lawn.

“My grass looked like shredded wheat,” she said, ruling out the possibility of an irrigation system accidentally left on for extended period.

Beaufort-Jasper Water and Sewer Authority spokeswoman Pamela Flasch said water usage “has been up across the board” in recent months, in part due to replanting of trees and shrubs following Hurricane Matthew.

But, she acknowledged that an exponential usage spike is an “unusual situation.”

“We are going to have to go out and do some investigating to try to figure out just exactly what’s going on. That’s a very drastic difference” between monthly usage totals, she said.

Cella isn’t the only one in Sun City with a mysterious spike in water usage on a March bill.

Bryan Miller owns a house near Cella’s. But he is in the process of selling the property and does not live in the home.

Despite the fact that no one was in the home taking daily showers or washing dishes, he said his water bill indicated that he used 26,000 gallons in February.

“I’ve never had this problem before,” he said. “My biggest water bill before this was for about 9,600 gallons.”

When he contacted the utility, “they suggested checking the toilets for leaks and everything. I know to look for things like that,” Miller said. “Even if I ran my sprinklers 24 hours a day, I don’t know if I could use 26,000 gallons in a month.

Both Cella and Miller suspect there is a problem with their meters or possibly with the way the meters were read in advance of March’s bill.

Beaufort-Jasper Water and Sewer Authority uses an automatic meter-reading system to determine how much water customers use every month.

Utility “employees drive a truck equipped with a special receiver down the street. As the truck passes a customer’s residence, the computer inside sends a low-power radio signal to the water meter,” according to the BJWSA website. “The meter then automatically transmits detailed water usage data to the computer. This information is stored on the computer until your bill is printed.”

After Cella reported her much higher than average water bill, her meter was checked twice.

On March 22, a technician determined there were “no leaks” and the meter’s “reading is correct,” according to comments written on a BJWSA hang-tag left on her door.

A week later, another test was conducted.

Again, the comments on another hang tag indicate the “meter is good” and “has no issues.”

So how could Cella have used 2,100 gallons in one month and 20,800 the following month?

“There has to be something wrong with these meters — something causing them to spike,” she said. “There can definitely be radio interference. My guess is that there’s issue between the meter and (the automatic meter-reading system) that caused the spike.”

Miller offered a similar theory.

“I think it was a glitch, but there’s no way for me to prove it,” he said. “I plead my case to (BJWSA), but the meter says what it says.”

Miller said he suspects the usage spike is “just a couple of isolated incidents,” but “if there’s a problem with the meter (or how the meter is being read), they need to fix it.”

While fellow Sun City resident Paul Vernes said his most recent water bill reflects his average water usage, he has had large monthly spikes in the past.

“I’m not complaining; water is very important,” he said. “It’s just strange that there are such differences from month to month.”

“We have no way of knowing whether (the meter reading) is right or wrong,” Vernes said.

Flasch said the utility is in the process of installing new meters that “allow costumers to go online and monitor their usage at any time.”

These new meters will be phased over the next few years to replace aging models, she said.

In the meantime, Vernes said he is developing his own water usage auditing system.

“Right now, we are monitoring our daily usage of water,” he said. “We are keeping track of how many times we run the dishwasher, how many times we use the washing machine, how many times we flush the toilet.”

He plans to use his own data to compare the usage he has calculated to the number of gallons billed by the utility.

Until the problem is resolved, though, customers are expected to pay the amount listed on their bills.

This story was originally published April 7, 2017 at 4:04 PM with the headline "Sun City residents baffled by water bill spikes."