Water...

Normally, water is my friend. Not so much lately.

My last water bill was $50 higher than it has been for the last 3-4 years. $50 is almost a week's worth of groceries for us. A big deal. After looking over my past bills I realized the difference was in the sewer fee. We just got a 'real' sewer about 3-4 years ago. Which jacked up our water bill but also put us in the 21st century.

So I call the water company (which is also our city government) and talked to a nice customer service rep who explained why the sewer rate went up. It's some very convoluted equation of water use during certain months of the year, blah, blah, blah. All good and well but we haven't used anymore water this past winter than we have in the past few years. Honest. At least not intentionally.

I try to conserve water where I can. Five minute showers. Use leftover water from boiling to water plants. Collect water from our evap cooler for outside watering. Turn off sprinklers after a rain (which isn't too often here in AZ). You get the idea. You'd think my bill would go down or at least stay the same.

So, something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Most likely some sort of leak. Ugh. I have the city's water conservation specialist coming out on Wednesday morning to check things out. I hope he finds the problem and it's not to expensive to fix. At least his services are 'free'.

To make matters worse, I get the mail yesterday and there's an overdue notice from the water company. WHAT? I know I paid that bill on time - just like always. So, I get my little water bill pile out and realize that I paid the bill on line but applied it to my sewer bill! You see, when we got the sewer we had to pay $2ooo for that privilege but they let us pay it in installments with a very low interest rate (aren't they nice?) We paid our sewer off last year but the account is still on my bill pay (lesson learned). You know what I'll be doing on Monday morning - I'll be on the phone AGAIN to the water dept to try to explain this mess. The funny thing is that the customer service rep never once mentioned that my bill was late - even though I said more than once "I already paid the bill even though I had questions about it."

Boy, I hope they can figure this all out. My current bill is $10 more than last month too. Luckily, the dog has taken to drinking out of the pool so that should help...