What does the water company charge you for?

[Terry]

My bill was 11$. It said my usage was 2 units. I know that is not gallons.

[Tony Hwang]

Hi, Here in Calgary, Alberta, the unit is by cubic meter measure by water meter which transimits the reading via radio wave.

[JoeSpareBedroom]

If Terry only used 2 cubic meters in a billing period, I wouldn't want to sit near him on a bus.

[Tony Hwang]

Hi, LOL! My family of four with 4 bathrooms use more or less 25 cubic meter on the average.

[lwasserm]

The actual unit could vary with the billing agency. In my area a IIRC a "unit" is 100 cubic feet.

[Todd H.]

Have a look at your meter. The units will be listed there on the dial plate. Cubic ft, I believe is what you may find if you're in the US.

Your usage, barring the subject period being only a few days, was likely very low because prior bills were estimated and not based on actual meter readings, and the water usage over the prior months was lower than the estimate.

-- Todd H.

[gfretwell]

Thousand gallons? That is 66 gallons a day. Not unreasonable if there is only one or two of you and you don't water the grass

[tnom]

One unit equals 748 gallons. I believe I pay $3 per unit

[Steve Barker]

Ours is in gallons. Can't imagine why they would measure water in cubic anything. Liquids are measured in gallons.

[Edwin Pawlowski]

True, but your meter probably reads cubic feet. One cubic foot = 7.48 gallons, so, 100 cubic feet as read off the meter is one unit or 748 gallons.

Use care in reading your meter as there are different types. Some are dials, others have a single dial and numbers like an odometer, some read decimal points and others do not, some have a multiplier where the meter reading is X10 (mostly for industrial use). Sometimes even the water company meter readers don't get it right. I've had the problem of under billing on one meter, over billing on another, in the amounts of thousands of dollars.

[tnom]

Water is measured in units. One unit equals 100 cubic feet (hcf)

1 hcf equals 748 gallons

[Todd H.]

But you are aware a gallon is simply a unit of volume though, right? Approximately equal to .1336 cubic feet?

Just ran down and checked my meter since this has all gotten interesting... my meter is a speedometer typer and reads in cubic feet.

My municipality's bill though doesn't indicate starting and ending readings though like electric and gas bills do, just dimensionless usage numbers. For 61 days, I used 21 somethings.

On the back of the bill, it explains "Water volume is billed in units of 100cubic feet (HCFT). One unit of HCFT equals seven hundred forty-eight (748)gallons of water."

Which matches what tnom very nicely said.

FWIW, we pay 2.57/unit for the water, plus 1.20/unit sewer maintenance, and 1.17/unit for sewer treatment.

Best Regards,

-- Todd H.

[George E. Cawthon]

This thread is a hoot. I'm glad I live in a place where the water company has enough sense to say what the units of measurement are. If fact, I would bet that most bills define the units of measurement. In my case the units are CCF which is defined at 100 cubic feet or 748 gallons. 2 month usage is 11-12 CCF (1,100-1,200 cubic feet, you do the math for gallons) when not irrigating.

Course the real problem is that the customer charge (mainly billing) is as much as the actual water charge (deliver costs plus maintenance). I should be so lucky as to have a business that charges as much to bill a customer as it does to actually provide a service/product. In my region, only the domestic water and irrigation water companies do this. Apparently the electric company, the gas company, and the sewer and trash companies realize that billing (every month) costs less per year than billing 6 times a year (domestic water) or only once a year (irrigation).

[# Fred #]

My bill was $60 for one unit. I was charged $18 for one unit, turning the meter on was $28 via radio signal and the rest was various charges including sewer maintenance. Don't you love how the City pad the bill. Just moved into the house so we see what my real bill will be when I use more water.

$11 is so cheap!!

[Rick Blaine]

You need to get out a little more and expand your horizons. The quantity being measured has a great deal to do with the units of measure. For example, time can be measured in years, months, days, hours, minutes or seconds...

In the case of residential water, many water systems use "units". A common conversion for residential water units is 100 cubic feet or 748 gallons.

To the OP who was billed for 2 units (presumably in a month), that equates to

1498 gallons, or around 50 gallons a day. Pretty much the average per person usage in the US.

[Rick Blaine]

And then you run into the municipalities that use the water bill as a back door way of taxing the residents without having to get voter approval...

[Steve Barker]

Ours is measured in gallons.

[Steve Barker]

Having lived within 300 miles my whole life, I guess I'm am in fact not familiar with other places water meters. Every place I've ever lived had read out directly in gallons.

[JoeSpareBedroom]

Same here. I don't understand why some nerd with a pocket protector would bother to create an arbitrary unit of measurement, other than to justify his job at the water authority.

[gfretwell]

Lee County Utilities (Fl) uses a Badger (brand) meter and it measures gallons.