Run the overnight meter test before you do anything else. Turn off every tap and appliance, read your water meter last thing at night, then read it again in the morning before anyone uses water. If the numbers moved, water is escaping somewhere on your property. That is Icon Water's own test, it costs nothing, and it takes one night to give you a straight yes or no.
A quarter of extra usage usually turns out to be one of three things: an irrigation line, a toilet that never quite stops, or a burst service line under the ground where nobody can see it. The test below tells you which category you are in.
How do you check for a water leak with your Icon Water meter?
The overnight meter test
- Turn off every tap, and every appliance that uses water: washing machine, dishwasher, irrigation controller, evaporative cooler, pool top-up. Tell the household nobody uses water overnight.
- Find the meter, normally at the front of the property near the boundary, and write down every digit last thing at night.
- Read it again first thing in the morning, before the first shower or flush.
- Compare. Same numbers means no leak on your side of the meter. Different numbers with no water used means water is going somewhere.
If you want a faster version during the day, turn everything off and watch the meter for 15 minutes. Any movement at all with nothing running means you are losing water. The overnight test is better because a slow leak needs hours to shift the dials enough to be obvious.
How do you read an Icon Water meter?
Read left to right. The black digits are kilolitres, which is thousands of litres, and the red digits are litres. So the black numbers are what your bill is calculated on, and the red numbers are the ones that show a slow leak, because they move first.
Icon Water's advice for keeping on top of your usage is to read the meter at about the same time each month and note both sets of numbers, subtract last month's reading from this month's to get monthly use, then divide by the number of days in the month for daily use. Once you know your normal daily figure, an extra 300 litres a day announces itself long before the bill does. Take a photo of the meter each time and the record keeps itself.
How much water can a small leak actually waste?
More than people expect, which is why a bill can double without anything looking wrong. These are Icon Water's own figures.
| Fault | Water wasted | How you spot it |
|---|---|---|
| Leaking toilet | Up to 700 litres a day | Food colouring in the cistern shows in the bowl without flushing |
| Dripping tap | Up to 150 litres a day | Visible, and audible at night |
| Broken sprinkler head | Up to 40 litres a minute | Run the system and walk the whole line |
| Underground service line leak | Varies, often the worst of the lot | Meter moves overnight with nothing on. Needs leak detection |
Where do hidden leaks happen in Canberra homes?
The pattern here follows the age of the housing stock. In the older brick veneer and early slab-on-ground homes through Woden and the Inner South, buried copper is the usual culprit, and copper that has spent fifty years in ACT soil pinholes at the low points. In newer estates it is more often a fitting on the service line that was never quite right, or an irrigation solenoid that fails open.
Places worth checking before you call anyone:
- Toilet cisterns. Put a few drops of food colouring in the tank, wait, and look in the bowl without flushing. Colour in the bowl means the outlet valve is passing.
- The hot water system. A relief valve that weeps constantly, or a tank leaking at the base, sends water straight down the drain where nobody looks.
- Irrigation and garden taps. A cracked poly fitting under a garden bed is the classic invisible leak, and mulch hides the wet patch.
- Under the house and around the meter. Damp ground, a green patch in a dry summer, or the sound of running water where there should not be any.
- Evaporative coolers and pool top-up lines. Both fill automatically, and both keep filling when a float sticks.
If the pressure has dropped as well as the bill going up, that is a strong sign of a leak on the incoming line rather than a fixture. Our guide to low water pressure causes works through that from the other direction.
Who is responsible for the pipe, you or Icon Water?
The dividing line is the meter. Icon Water states that as the property owner you own and are responsible for maintaining and repairing all of the pipes and fittings from the water meter, and you carry the cost of water lost from them, whatever the size of the block. Everything on the street side is theirs.
So if the leak is on your side, it is a plumbing job. If you or your plumber work out that the fault is on the network, ring Icon Water's 24 hour repairs and faults line on 6248 3111 and get the reference number, because plumbers are not authorised to work on the utility network. Icon Water asks you to submit your plumber's invoice for consideration for reimbursement where the fault is confirmed as theirs.
Can you get your bill adjusted after a hidden leak?
Sometimes. Icon Water has a residential undetected leak adjustment for leaks that could not have been found by looking. Their definition is specific: the leak has to be hidden from view, such as under a concrete driveway or under a building. A leak in a paddock, yard or garden does not count, because a green patch or boggy ground can be seen.
The adjustment is based on the increase in usage over the same period the previous year, capped at $2500, with any remaining increase recalculated at the Tier 1 tariff, and it shows on the invoice as its own line item. Other conditions worth knowing before you count on it:
- A licensed plumber has to confirm the leak was hidden from view, and provide a statement or invoice with the repair date, how the leak was found, its nature and location, and where the water was escaping to.
- Faulty fixtures are excluded, so taps, leaking showers, toilet cisterns, hot water systems and sprinkler systems do not qualify.
- It covers a maximum of two billing periods, and it is granted once only to the current owner.
- Get the application in within a reasonable time, which Icon Water describes as around four months of the billing period.
It is a policy concession rather than an entitlement, so the paperwork matters. That is the whole reason we write our leak reports the way we do. If you are renting rather than paying the water account yourself, the repair itself is the owner's responsibility: see who pays for plumbing repairs in an ACT rental.
How do you find a leak you cannot see?
By elimination first, then equipment. Isolating sections of the property at the stop taps narrows down which line is losing water, and a pressure test on that line confirms it. From there it is acoustic listening gear to hear water escaping under concrete, thermal imaging to pick up the temperature difference a hot water leak leaves in a slab, and tracer gas for the stubborn ones. Nine times in ten that gets us to a spot we can open up in one place rather than trenching a driveway.
That is what leak detection in Canberra is for. It costs a fraction of what a quarter of leaking water costs, and far less than repairing the damage a slow slab leak does to flooring and footings once it has had a year to work.
What to do this week
Run the overnight test tonight. If the meter moves, do the food colouring test on every toilet and shut the irrigation off at the tap, then test again the next night. If it still moves, call us. And if the bill arrived months ago and you have been meaning to look into it, do the test now anyway, because the four month window on an Icon Water adjustment claim is not generous.
Where these details come from
- Icon Water: leaks for the overnight meter test, how to read the meter, the litres wasted figures and the faults line.
- Icon Water: adjustment for residential undetected leak for the $2500 cap, the Tier 1 recalculation and the documents required.
- Icon Water: definition of undetected leaks for what counts as hidden from view, the exclusions and the time limits.
Meter moving with everything off?
We will locate the leak, repair it, and give you the written report for an Icon Water claim.