Lowering your Water Bill

Your water charges reflect the costs of cleaning and delivering safe, high quality drinking water to your home. Your sewer charges reflect the costs of collecting the wastewater, transporting it to a waste treatment plant, and cleaning the water to almost drinking water quality. The cleanliness standards for both drinking water and treated wastewater are set by the state and federal government. By lowering your water consumption during the winter months, you can lower your bills all year long. How does that work?

• Your Water Use is Metered: To ensure that customers are charged fairly for water, City of Sachse uses meters to measure water use. All water customers have water meters of various sizes based on their needs.
• How Your Residential Sewer Average is Calculated Your water use for the months of November, December, January, February and March are the basis for the calculation. These are the best months for averaging because customers water their lawns less in the winter; therefore irrigation water is not inflating the amount of water transported into the sanitary sewer. The highest and lowest use months are removed from the calculation, and the three remaining months are averaged to determine the monthly volume. This calculated volume will be billed for the next 12 months.

Water Using Equipment

• Toilets: Replace high water use toilets with low volume flush toilets. All of the toilets sold today are low flow toilets. If replacement is too costly, consider adding a water displacement device, such as a water filled plastic container, to your toilet. Do NOT use a brick for this purpose as it can crumble and damage the fixture.
• Showers: Install a water efficient shower head. This is the single most effective conservation step that can be taken inside the home.
• Sinks: Install a faucet aerator on all of your sinks.
• Washing Machines: Install a water efficient clothes washer that has adjustable or automatically adjusting water levels for different load sizes. Some water providers offer rebates on high efficiency washers.
• Dishwashers: Install a water efficient dishwasher that uses 7 gallons of water per load or less.