Hey guys,
First of all, thanks for all the replies on this plea for help. A
couple of people mentioned turning off the main
to the house and seeing what happened - I did, and lo and behold, the
spinning stopped. - not a leak in the
line to the house after all (!).
What gets better is that I've spent the last day or so after that poking
and prodding everything in the
house trying to find a leak - there wasn't one. After much grief, I
found the problem (keep reading).
The curious thing about the "leak detector" was that it would spin
forward several revolutions and then back
a quarter turn or so and then stop for some random length of time before
doing it again. The increase in the
bill correlated to when I put in a new water heater - part of that
was installing one of those "surge cans" (the thingy with the rubber
bladder in it that's supposed to act as
an expansion tank for the hot water heater/absorb shocks in the system).
I disconnected that and - amazingly
enough, the leak detector stopped spinning (!). My conclusion was that
all the surges in the water main were
being damped by my new surge tank and I was getting to pay for the
priveledge of doing this.
I called the water company about this, since lotsa municipalities put in
check valves to prevent backflow
from houses into their pristine system (and to apply for a "leak
adjustment" since I'm not terribly interested
in sending the city any more of my hard earned cash than they already
extract) - turns out they have no
check valves in their water system, and when the call center droid
called an inspector droid his observation
was that the meter spun like this when you had air in the system and
suggested purging it (like duh, what do
they think a surge can is...). - this is incredible since I believe code
requires these stupid cans (or some other
kind of pressure relief system - I had a funky valve before that had
died (this was a mid 60s house - tried
to get a replacement and even the pro plumbing shops looked at the unit
and couldn't figure out
what it was/a replacement for it), which is why I went to the can).
I'm now not sure what to do next - maybe new installations require
backflow valves in the house somewhere on new work - guess
I'll have to try and get ahold of an inspector droid after I get back
from SF and see if I can figure out what to do.
Grrr... I hate plumbing...
Thx,
rkg
(Richard George)
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