A water bill that doubles without explanation almost always means irrigation. Not a burst pipe with water in the street, but a valve that never fully closes or a cracked lateral line feeding water into the soil where nobody sees it. Here is how to confirm it in about fifteen minutes.
Compare gallons, not dollars
Rates change, so a higher bill does not automatically mean higher use. Find the gallons figure and compare it to the same month last year. Austin Water bills show usage history for exactly this reason. A summer increase is normal. A doubling is not.
Watch for a jump that appears and then stays. Leaks do not fix themselves, so an irrigation fault shows as a new baseline rather than a one-month spike.
Run the meter test
Turn off every water-using fixture in the house. Find your meter, usually near the street in a box. Note the reading or watch the small leak indicator dial. Wait fifteen minutes with nothing running.
If the dial has moved, water is going somewhere. If it has not, run each irrigation zone manually and check the meter during each one. The zone where usage spikes disproportionately is the one with the problem.
What usually fails
A valve diaphragm that no longer seals is the most common culprit: the zone weeps continuously, often showing as one area that stays soggy. Cracked lateral lines from clay shifting are second. Broken heads are obvious when running but invisible when off.
The one people miss is the backflow assembly after a freeze. A hairline crack releases water slowly and constantly, and because the assembly is usually beside the house rather than in the lawn, nobody notices the wet ground.
What it costs to ignore
A leaking valve can waste thousands of gallons a month. Beyond the bill, constantly saturated soil kills roots and invites fungal problems, so you end up paying for the water twice: once to the utility and again in replacement plants.
If the meter test points to irrigation, our sprinkler system service includes locating the fault rather than guessing at it.
What a leak costs before you find it
A valve that weeps continuously can waste several thousand gallons a month without ever showing water above ground. On a typical Austin residential rate structure, sustained high usage also pushes you into higher tiers, so the marginal gallons cost more than the first ones. That is why a leak often doubles a bill rather than raising it slightly.
The second cost is the landscape itself. Soil that stays saturated drives out oxygen, and roots suffocate. You end up replacing plants that died from too much water while paying for the water that killed them. On blackland clay, prolonged saturation near a foundation is a structural concern rather than a gardening one.
Fixes you can do and fixes you should not
Replacing a broken spray head is genuinely a homeowner job: unscrew, match the model and arc, screw the new one on. Adjusting arcs so they stop watering the driveway costs nothing and is worth an evening.
Anything involving the valves, the mainline or the backflow assembly is different. Texas requires a TCEQ licensed irrigator for installing, altering or repairing irrigation systems, and the backflow assembly specifically protects your drinking water from contamination. That is not a place to save money or experiment.
If the meter test shows movement but you cannot locate the source, a pressure test on each zone will isolate it faster than digging.
Think you have an irrigation leak?
We locate the actual failure instead of replacing parts until it stops.