Plumbers in Killeen, Texas

The gap between the master meter and the sum of the units

On a submetered property you have two sets of numbers every month: what the utility charges the master meter, and what the unit meters add up to. They never match exactly. A few per cent is normal and covers irrigation, hose bibs, the laundry room and meter tolerance. Fifteen or twenty per cent is a leak, and it has been running for as long as the gap has.

Track the ratio month by month rather than the dollars. Dollars move when rates change and when occupancy changes, and that noise hides a slow leak for a year. The ratio moves only when water starts going somewhere it did not used to go, which makes a step change in it the most useful early warning any owner has.

Note the direction too. A gap that grows steadily over several months is a leak getting worse. A gap that appears in one month and stays flat is usually something that was switched on and left on: an irrigation valve, a hose left running to a pressure washer, a filled pool.

Where unaccounted water actually goes

In order of how often we find it on Killeen properties:

Toilets, and it is not close. A flapper that seats badly passes water silently and continuously. One of them across a fourplex can account for a meaningful share of a monthly gap, and because it makes no noise and leaves no mark, nobody reports it.

Irrigation on the domestic supply. Common on older courts where the landscaping was added after the plumbing. A stuck zone valve waters at three in the morning, drains to the street, and never appears on anyone's floor.

The line between the meter and the buildings. On properties with several structures behind one meter there can be a hundred feet of private supply under a parking area. A break there surfaces slowly through asphalt or not at all.

Hose bibs and laundry rooms. Unmetered, unwatched, and in a shared laundry the supply hoses are usually the oldest components on the property.

A slab leak in an occupied unit. Rarer than the rest, but it is the one where the tenant reports warm flooring or a hot water bill they cannot explain, and the repair has a timetable attached to it.

Worth saying what is almost never the answer: tenants filling paddling pools, washing cars, or otherwise using water carelessly. Owners reach for that explanation first because it is the only one with a person attached to it. In a decade of chasing these, deliberate waste has accounted for almost nothing, and a fixture failing quietly has accounted for nearly all of it. Start with the hardware.

Finding the unit without knocking on every door

The sequence is the same whether it is four units or forty, and it works around tenants rather than through them.

First, a night reading. Take the master meter late and again before anyone is up, with the irrigation controller switched off so it cannot run in between. Any consistent overnight flow on a small property is a fault, not use.

Second, isolate outward. Close the valve to the irrigation, then to the laundry and the hose bibs, watching the meter after each. That alone resolves a good half of the cases without entering a single unit.

Third, work the risers. If the property was built with a stop per unit, closing them in turn narrows it to one address in under an hour. If it was not, which is common in the older eight unit courts, fitting those stops is worth doing on its own merits: it turns every future repair from a whole property shutdown into one unit.

Only then do you knock, and you knock on one door instead of eight.

Keeping submetered billing defensible

Texas has rules for owners who bill residents for water, whether by unit submeter or by an allocation formula, and they are mostly about record keeping. Keep the master bill and the unit readings for each cycle. Bill no more than what the utility charged you. Be able to produce a reading history for a unit when it is asked for, and have a meter tested when a resident disputes it.

The plumbing side of staying defensible is simpler: meters that are readable and accessible, unit stops that work, and a documented response when a resident reports a running fixture. A property that can show it fixed a reported leak within days is in a very different position from one that cannot.

Where submeters do not exist and billing is allocated by occupants or square footage, the incentive to report a leak sits with nobody, so the owner has to go looking. On those properties the monthly ratio is not a nice to have. It is the only detection you own.

How we work with owners here

We would rather do one scheduled visit a quarter than five emergency calls a year. That visit is the meter comparison, the overnight test if the numbers ask for it, a flapper and stop check on any unit turning over, and a written note of what is deteriorating rather than broken, so the next repair is a budgeted one.

Killeen, Harker Heights, Nolanville, Belton and Temple are all inside our normal Bell County run, and we will hold a standing rate for owners with more than one property on the list.