Your water bill jumped $80 this month.
Here's what's probably wrong.

What's actually happening to your water

The first thing worth saying: a $80 jump on a monthly water bill is not a drip. It's not a faucet you left on for an afternoon, and it's not a toilet that runs for forty seconds after you flush. Those things cost pennies. What you're looking at is somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand extra gallons of water, running through your meter over the course of a thirty-day billing cycle. Something is meaningfully broken.

The good news is that the cause is almost always the same thing. Indoor plumbing in a typical North Richland Hills home is pretty well-sealed — modern PEX and copper lines don't usually spring quiet leaks, and when indoor plumbing does fail, you usually know about it quickly because it's in your wall or under your sink making noise or staining something visible. Irrigation systems are the opposite. They're designed to move large volumes of water quickly, they sit underground or behind valve boxes, and they run on timers — often in the middle of the night, while everyone is asleep. When something fails out there, it can waste a thousand gallons before breakfast and nobody notices for weeks.

In my six years working in this market, a sudden unexplained bill spike has been an irrigation problem in more than ninety percent of the cases I've been called out for. The rest split roughly evenly between supply-line leaks (the pipe from the street meter to the house — rare but real), pool fill-valve failures, and the one or two unusual cases involving a toilet flapper that finally gave out at the worst possible moment. Everything else: sprinklers.

Three failure modes, one big symptom

When I get called about a bill spike, what's actually happened is one of three things. Knowing which one it is up front changes the diagnosis, so it's worth learning the difference before you start looking:

1. A broken sprinkler head or missing nozzle, running during a normal irrigation cycle. Your system is still on its regular schedule, but instead of spraying a nice fan pattern across the lawn, one head is shooting straight up, geysering out of the ground, or spraying onto the driveway where half the water evaporates. This is the most common. It wastes maybe 200-400 gallons per cycle — and if you irrigate three or four days a week, that adds up fast.
2. A cracked underground lateral line, releasing water every time any zone runs. You probably won't see anything at the surface except maybe a persistently wet or squishy spot in the lawn. Every time that zone's valve opens, water flows into the ground through the break instead of out through the heads. Wastage can be dramatic — sometimes a thousand gallons per watering cycle.
3. A failed valve that won't fully close. This is the worst one because it runs continuously. Your controller is off, your system looks idle, but a valve in the manifold is stuck partially open, letting water through twenty-four hours a day. This is what causes the really nasty bills — three to four thousand gallons per day until you find it.

The diagnostic sequence below is designed to identify which of these three you have, in the order that's most likely to be true. If you work through it top to bottom, most people find the problem within fifteen or twenty minutes.

How to find it yourself in twenty minutes

Here's the sequence. You need three things: access to your water meter (usually at the street, in a small concrete box with a metal lid), access to your sprinkler controller, and ten minutes of nobody in the house running water. That's it.

Step 1 · Confirm it's outdoor, not indoor

Turn off every indoor water source you can think of: faucets, dishwasher, washing machine, ice maker. If anyone is home, tell them not to flush or run water for the next thirty minutes. Now go look at your water meter.

Most modern meters have a small triangle, star, or dial that moves any time water is flowing, even at low rates — it's called the low-flow indicator or leak indicator. Watch it for sixty seconds. If it's moving at all, water is flowing somewhere. If it's completely still, the issue isn't a constant leak — it's something that only runs during irrigation cycles, and you move to Step 2.

If the indicator is moving with all indoor water off, you've just confirmed something important: you have a continuous outdoor leak. That's the worst kind (failure mode #3 from above) but at least you know what you're looking for. Skip to Step 3.

Step 2 · Run each zone manually, and watch it

Go to your sprinkler controller. Most controllers have a manual test function — usually a button labeled Manual, Test, or a dial position that says something similar. If yours is a Hunter, Rain Bird, Hydrawise, or Rachio (the four most common brands in NRH), there's a physical button or app screen that lets you run a single zone on demand.

Start with Zone 1. Run it for two minutes. While it's running, walk the zone. Don't just stand at the controller. Walk to where the heads should be spraying and watch them. Here's what you're looking for, ranked by how common each is:

• A head shooting straight up instead of fanning out. Nozzle is broken, missing, or the head is stuck in its riser. This is the #1 cause. Sometimes visible from twenty feet away as a geyser.
• A wet or soft patch of lawn where no head is spraying. Underground lateral line crack. You'll see bubbling or standing water in that spot, or just notice the grass is greener and squishier there than elsewhere.
• One head that never pops up at all. Could just be a failed head, but could also mean the water is going somewhere else — like through a crack upstream.
• Water coming out of a valve box (those green or black rectangular plastic boxes in your yard). That's a valve or manifold leak, and it's expensive ignored — but easy to fix once located.
• A head spraying sideways onto the driveway, sidewalk, fence, or into a flower bed at the wrong angle. Not exactly wasted gallons, but worth noting. Someone may have bumped it with a mower.

Run every zone, one at a time. Write down anything weird. This takes ten or fifteen minutes depending on how many zones you have.

Step 3 · Recheck the meter after shutdown

After you've run and shut down every zone, wait ten more minutes with nothing running inside or out. Go back to the meter. Watch the low-flow indicator for another sixty seconds.

If it's still moving now, even after all zones are verified off at the controller, you have failure mode #3 — a valve that isn't fully closing. Water is leaking continuously through a valve somewhere in your system. This is usually the manifold at the main supply, though it can also be an in-line valve for a specific zone. Either way, it's the most expensive problem to ignore and one of the cheapest to fix once located.

Step 4 · Shut off your irrigation at the main

Whatever you found — or didn't find — turn off water to your irrigation system. There's almost always a main shutoff valve between the backflow preventer (the brass thing near your house, usually against a wall) and the valve manifold. Some systems also have a ball valve inside the backflow itself.

Shutting this off stops the bleeding. Your lawn will be fine for a few days without water, especially if it's not July. You've just saved yourself hundreds of gallons a day until the actual repair happens.

What the repair actually costs

I'm going to tell you the real numbers, not a marketing range. This is what I charge, and roughly what most honest irrigation contractors in the NRH-Keller-Southlake corridor charge as of 2026. Your specific repair may be cheaper or more expensive depending on which head, which valve, how buried it is, and what the underlying cause turns out to be — but the following is a solid estimate for the common cases.

When to call versus when to wait and watch

Call today if: the meter is still moving with everything off (continuous leak, bleeding money every hour); the bill is $100+ higher than normal (too much to let sit another week); or you've found a geysering head and your own shutoff valve doesn't work.

Reasonable to wait a few days if: you've isolated it to one broken head on one zone; you've shut off the system at the main valve; the bill is elevated but not crazy; or you're comfortable doing the repair yourself (replacing a pop-up head is genuinely something most handy people can handle with a $15 head from the hardware store).

A note on the DIY route, honestly: replacing a visible pop-up head in a residential lawn is a legitimate DIY project if you're reasonably handy. It takes fifteen minutes and costs under twenty dollars. If that's your situation, you don't need to hire me. The repairs where it's worth calling are the underground ones, the valve-box ones, and the "I can't figure out what's wrong" ones.

The bottom line

A surprise water bill feels terrible, but it's almost always a fixable problem, almost always in the irrigation system, and almost always cheaper to fix than the bill it's going to generate next month if you leave it alone. Twenty minutes of your own time with the diagnostic sequence above will get you to a clear answer about 85% of the time. For the remaining 15% — the underground mysteries, the weird intermittent issues, the valves that only leak on Tuesdays — that's why contractors like me exist.

If you've worked through the diagnostic and confirmed it's irrigation, or if you've worked through it and can't figure out what's going on, you know where to find me. I'll show up when I said I would, bring the right part, and charge you what I quoted.