Does a dripping tap cost money?
If you’ve ever been kept awake all night by a tap dripping in the bathroom, you’ll know just how annoying it can be.
As well as being very irritating, a dripping tap can also have a huge effect on your water charges if you are one of the increasing numbers of British households who are opting for a water meter to cut their bills.
So why do we put up with a dripping tap rather than getting someone in to fix it?
How much does a dripping tap cost?
It’s perhaps shocking to learn that a dripping tap left for a year could add as much as £100 onto the cost of your water bill.
Even a tap which drips slowly is losing over 180 litres a day, or 66,000 litres of water over the course of a year.
Taps which run at a constant dribble and can never be shut off completely can use over 450 litres of water a day, or 175,000 litres in a year, costing the homeowner an additional £300 onto their water bill.
And those figures are just for the cold tap – if it’s a hot water tap which is dripping, you can add further hundreds of pounds onto your gas bill too for the water which is just going straight down the drain.
Fixing a dripping tap
Lots of us are scared of plumbing and think we’ll flood the house if we start to mess around with the bathroom taps.
If that sounds like you, it’s probably best that you call in the professionals to tackle the job.
Fixing a dripping tap is a very quick job for an experienced plumber, and it will only take him about 30 minutes.
Even if you decide not to repair the tap and have it replaced completely with something new, the job will be quick and straightforward.
Homeowners are often reluctant to call out the plumber for something as apparently trivial as a leaking tap, but it is £50 well spent when you consider how much you will be saving on your water meter bill.
Even having a new set of taps fitted to your sink will cost less than £100, and the taps themselves will cost anything upwards of £20.
Unless it turns out that there are other problems when the contractors come to look at fixing the dripping tap, you can expect a ceiling cost for fixing a dripping tap to be maximum £300 inclusive of the supply of a brand new set of taps.
Finding a plumber to do the job
Although it’s a fairly minor job, it’s still worth shopping around to make sure you are getting the best price for the job.
A dripping tap is not an emergency and does not warrant a call out to the 24 hour plumber, so get the best price by being flexible about when you have the work done.
Even for a relatively inexpensive job such as this, never pay the plumber in full up front, although it may be reasonable to give him a small amount to cover the cost of the taps if he is supplying them.
