Common Questions
A water bill that jumps with no change in your habits almost always means a leak somewhere. Here is the meter test that confirms it in ten minutes.
A water bill that jumps without a change in your habits almost always means water is leaving the system somewhere. You can confirm it in about ten minutes: shut off every water-using fixture and appliance in the house, then watch the water meter. If it is still registering flow, you have a leak. In Florida homes the culprit is usually one of five things — a running toilet, the irrigation system, a slab leak, the pool auto-fill, or the water heater relief valve.
A sudden jump in your water bill is almost always a leak, and you can confirm it yourself in ten minutes with the meter. Here is the test, and the five usual suspects in a Central Florida home.
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General industry practice and Florida-specific context. Where a figure changes over time (statutory deadlines, policy limits, pricing), the text says so and points to where to confirm it rather than stating false precision.
Not legal, insurance-coverage, or engineering advice. Specific properties and specific policies vary.
Turn off every fixture and appliance that uses water. Faucets, dishwasher, washing machine, ice maker, irrigation controller, pool auto-fill, water softener regeneration. Make sure nobody flushes anything for the duration.
Open the meter box at the street — usually a rectangular plastic or concrete lid in the ground near the sidewalk. Most residential meters have a small leak indicator: a triangle, a star, or a small dial that spins when even a trickle is moving. Watch it for a couple of minutes.
If the indicator moves at all with everything off, water is flowing somewhere. If it does not move, note the exact reading, wait an hour with the house still, and read it again. Any change confirms a slow leak that the indicator was too coarse to catch.
To narrow it down, close the main shutoff at the house — the one on the exterior wall, not the meter valve — and repeat. If the meter still moves with the house isolated, the leak is between the meter and the house, which is typically the utility service line and often the homeowner's responsibility from the meter forward. If the meter stops, the leak is inside the house or its irrigation system.
A silently running toilet is the most common hidden leak in any house. A worn flapper lets water seep from the tank into the bowl continuously, and because it makes no noise and produces no puddle, it can run for months.
The test costs nothing. Put a few drops of food coloring in the tank — not the bowl — and do not flush. Wait fifteen to twenty minutes. If color appears in the bowl, the flapper is not sealing.
The volume is genuinely large. A steadily leaking flapper can move hundreds of gallons a day, which is exactly the shape of bill increase that makes people think their meter is broken. The flapper itself is a few dollars, and it is one of the few plumbing repairs most homeowners can do.
The fill valve is the other half. If the tank overfills and water runs continuously down the overflow tube, the fill valve or float needs adjustment or replacement.
Irrigation is near-universal in Central Florida and is a frequent cause of unexplained bills, partly because most of it runs at night when nobody is watching.
The usual failures are a cracked or sheared sprinkler head, a valve that does not fully close and lets a zone weep continuously, a broken lateral line underground, or a controller that reverted to a default schedule after a power interruption and is now running far more often than you set it to.
Look for a zone that is greener, soggier, or has standing water when the rest of the yard is dry. Run each zone manually and walk it. Check the controller schedule against what you actually intended, especially after a storm-related outage.
If your irrigation is on a separate meter, compare the two bills — that isolates the problem immediately.
Most Polk County homes are built on slab, with supply lines running through or beneath the concrete. When one develops a pinhole, the water goes into the ground and often into the house.
The signs are distinctive: a warm or hot spot on the floor if it is the hot line, the sound of running water when everything is off, unexplained damp carpet or flooring, a musty smell with no visible source, cracks appearing in the slab or walls, and a water bill that climbed and stayed climbed.
This is not a do-it-yourself diagnosis. Locating a slab leak requires acoustic listening equipment, pressure testing, and sometimes thermal imaging. Guessing and cutting concrete is expensive and frequently wrong.
It is also the leak most likely to become a mold problem, because it feeds moisture into the structure continuously and invisibly, often for weeks before anyone connects the bill to the smell.
A pool with an automatic fill device will quietly top off a leaking pool forever, and the water goes onto your bill rather than onto the ground where you would see it. Shut off the auto-fill and mark the water level. If it drops noticeably more than evaporation would explain over a day, the pool or its plumbing is leaking. In a Florida summer, roughly a quarter to a half inch a day of evaporation is normal; substantially more than that is not.
A water heater relief valve that discharges continuously sends water down its drain line, frequently to the exterior or a floor drain where nobody notices. Check the discharge tube for wetness. A T&P valve that keeps opening also indicates a pressure or temperature problem worth diagnosing on its own merits.
Two more worth checking: a water softener stuck in regeneration cycles far more often than it should be, and an outdoor hose bib or its underground supply weeping where the water soaks in without pooling.
Many Central Florida water utilities offer a one-time leak adjustment that credits part of an abnormally high bill caused by a leak you have since repaired. Terms vary by provider, and they generally require documentation — typically the plumber's invoice showing the repair and the date.
Call your utility, ask specifically whether a leak adjustment or leak forgiveness program exists, and find out what documentation they want before you have the repair done. It is a short phone call and it sometimes recovers a meaningful portion of the bill.
Keep the invoice regardless. It is also the documentation your insurance carrier will want if the leak caused damage.
If the meter confirms flow but you cannot find the source after checking the toilets, the irrigation, and the visible fixtures, the leak is likely underground, in a wall, or under the slab — and those need equipment to locate.
Call sooner if you have any sign of a slab leak: a warm floor spot, running water with everything off, or damp flooring with no explanation. That one is not just costing you money on the bill; it is putting water into the structure every hour.
We answer 863-624-3931 around the clock across Polk County. Leak detection is worth doing properly, because the expensive part of this problem is rarely the water — it is what the water does to the building while nobody knows where it is going.
Ingenious Finder
Winter Haven-based Polk County local services directory. Call 863-624-3931 for plumbing, mold and water remediation, carpet cleaning, and related local service requests.