Sharing what I just learned about water bill

TL; DR: wastewater usage charge throughout year 2 is based on your water usage in the first half of year 1.

We all know the water bill in Bellevue is very high. That is no longer news to me (probably still gonna shock a lot of people who just moved here).

I’ve been living in a townhouse in Bellevue since the summer of 2022 so it has been almost three years. Somehow I always keep my water bill that came through mail (I am glad I did that, since the online system will not keep that records for too long). So the past weekend I got bored enough to go over almost every bill that I got in the past three years to understand each component of the bill and how it is calculated. With a helpful call with the utility department on Monday, I think now I have a good understanding.

The water & wastewater in Bellevue is billed bi-monthly. The bill consists of two parts: water bill and wastewater bill.

Water bill consists of three parts:

1. Base charge, a fixed amount charge that depends on the meter size capacity of your household.
2. Usage charge, which depends on how many ccf of water is consumed over the billing period. The unit price is tiered, and it will gets more expensive as you use more water.
3. Tax on the sum of the previous two component, about 12%

Wastewater is structured the same:

1. Base charge, a fixed amount charge set by King County.
2. Usage charge, here comes the tricky part, on the government website it says: this charge is calculated based on your average water usage during the winter months of the previous year.
3. Tax on the sum of the previous two component, about 5%

But what does it really mean? what is the definition of the winter months? Well, it turns out the winter months actually referred to from Dec 15th till June 15th in the next year (I don’t know about you guys, but it is very counterintuitive to me that winter months turned out to mean the first half of the year).

What happens is that, there is not a meter to measure the usage of wastewater, so the government use the usage of water as an approximation. Here is an example of the calculation: since we get water bill bi-monthly, that means over the 6 months window from Dec 15, 2022 till June 15, 2023, your water meter will be read three times and three data points of water usage will be recorded. Suppose it is 6 ccf, 7 ccf, 8 ccf, then the average would be 7 ccf. Therefore, 7 ccf will be used as an estimate of wastewater usage throughout the year of 2024.

What if this is the first year of you moving to a new place? You won’t have a past history of water usage. In this case, the government will assume that that number to be 15 ccf.

Some of you might say, but I don’t use that much water in two months, so it is not fair to charge me using that assumption. In this case, after you have two complete billing cycles, and your water usage is indeed lower than 15 ccf, you can call the utility department and ask them to adjust the estimate.

This also means that, it will be a good idea of keep track of your water usage, in case you have any leaking happening especially in the first half of the year, because that would likely boost your wastewater usage charge throughout the whole next year. In that case, you should contact the utility department when you realize that you have a leaking and report it. They could help you avoid using the outlier water usage as the baseline estimate for your wastewater usage.

All in all, if you have any questions, just give utility department a call. They are very friendly and very helpful (and let’s save water to save our wallet & Mother Earth)