Check your water bills carefully, say residents

April 20, 2016 · 0 Comments

This letter may perhaps prevent someone else from suffering our unfortunate and expensive experience.
We are an elderly couple, 89 and 91, who are struggling to live independently in our Aurora home of 32 years. Recently, my neighbour compared his water bills with ours and was aghast to find that ours were triple.
We contacted Aurora Town Office who sent a young man who found invisible leaks in our toilets which were impossible for us to notice.
The meter was checked and found to be working properly.
Since then, we have installed new toilets; another expense.
Upon request, we received a copy of our previous water bills for the past ten years which showed gradually increasing costs from $178 to $668; this is for two elderly people, a couple of laundry loads and three showers each a week and never watering our lawn.
Of course, we pride ourselves on paying our bills and have never been in arrears and these payments were deducted on an ongoing basis from our bank account. However, we wonder what, if any responsibility does Aurora bear in terms of scrutiny.
We understand that Toronto users are informed by their billing department if there are changes in usage, and also that their meters indicate if there are leakages.
Enbridge’s recent insert shows they are monitoring gas usage in homes of similar footage with a comparison graph. Is it not possible to do something similar for water, based on the number of occupants?
It would be interesting to know how many people are checking their basement water meters, or how many even know how to read them.
How many toilets are silently leaking?
If this letter can help someone else avoid the problems we have encountered, it will be worthwhile.

Alma and Joe Durkin
Aurora