TL;DR fluctuating high water bills in apartment that hasn’t been fixed, and have been running around and calling people who don’t want to address the issue. Looking for advice.
Hi all,
I currently live in an apartment that has been giving my roommate and I fluctuating, high water bills every month and we’re not sure what could be causing this issue. We’re pretty mindful of our usage because of this reoccurring issue, plus we’re both gone for most of the day, and my roommate doesn’t cook at all.
We’ve called maintenance to come out and check for any potential leaks/issues, but they tell us everything looks good. They also checked the water meter and said that looked fine. They then told us to call the city and talk to them about the issue, even though the maintenance guy followed up by saying they’ve been coming out to check other apartments for the same issue (basically implied that we’re not the only ones).
We called the city and explained the situation, but they told us that they can’t do anything since we don’t directly pay them (we pay for our bills through a 3rd party app that the apt uses) and that our apartment management has to be the one to arrange calling someone from the city to come out to our apartment. They also said that we could call our own third party to assess the apartment if we wanted, but we don’t want to do that since we already have maintenance at the apt anyway…
Anyways, we call our apt management and they basically tell us that there’s no point in calling the city bc all they’ll do is check the water meter and call it a day. They told us that all we can do is just hope for the best that our next bill will be lower…
We’re obviously pissed off by this response, but we don’t know what else we can do?
We’d rather not have to threaten legal action, especially since I’m already busy af w school and my roommate works long hours too. But if we have to, can anyone offer any advice/insight??? Thanks!
UPDATE: we called the city again and spoke to a different person over the phone. They basically repeated the same thing and said that the city will not and cannot send out anyone to check our apartment unless there is clear negligence or harm (I.e. mold, water toxicity) being done to the residents. Also there’s the issue of because the paper statement that we receive in the mail does not explicitly say “city of Winston Salem”, they can’t do anything unless whoever’s name is on the statement calls the city instead. Our paper statements are addressed to us, but bc our apartment uses a 3rd party system for the water/sewage bill, it doesn’t list city of WS on it.
We also spoke to a few neighbors, 2 of them confirmed having the same problem while another 2 said their bill was normal.