A high water bill in Lanzarote almost always means a leak
If your Canal Gestión bill has jumped and you haven't changed anything about how you use water, you've almost certainly got a leak. Water on Lanzarote is expensive — about 40% more than the Spanish mainland — because every litre is desalinated from seawater. So a leak that would be a small annoyance somewhere else is a real bill problem here.
This post is what Leakbusters Lanzarote actually checks first when a customer calls about an unexplained high bill. Most of it you can check yourself before you call us.
What's normal
A normal family of four on Lanzarote uses about 12-15 cubic metres a month. That's everything — showers, kitchen, washing machine, toilets, a bit of garden watering. If your bill is showing 25, 35, or 50 cubic metres and nothing has changed, something is leaking.
If you've got a pool, add 6-8 cubic metres per month in summer just for evaporation on a 40m² pool. That's not a leak, that's physics. We do free bucket tests to tell genuine pool leaks from evaporation.
The four most common culprits
Leaking toilet
This is number one by a long way. The flapper valve in the cistern wears out, water trickles continuously into the bowl, and you can lose 300-500 litres a day without ever hearing it run. Over a 90-day billing cycle that's 27-45 cubic metres — enough to triple a normal bill.
Easy test: drop a few coloured drops (food colouring, or any dark dye) into the cistern. Don't flush. Wait 30 minutes. If colour appears in the bowl, the flapper is leaking. A new one is €10 from any ferretería.
Dripping tap or shower
A tap dripping once a second is about 11,000 litres a year. Wastes money quietly. Replace washers or the cartridge.
Irrigation
Garden irrigation is the biggest hidden waster on Lanzarote. Programmable timers set up by someone two years ago who's now gone. Sprinkler heads broken off and pouring into the lawn for an hour every morning. Drip lines split by a strimmer.
Walk the garden during a scheduled watering cycle and watch what every emitter and head is doing.
Hidden leak in the supply line
This is where Leakbusters Lanzarote comes in. If the toilet, taps, and irrigation all look fine, the leak is somewhere you can't see — usually a buried supply line, a slab leak, or a corroded joint inside a wall. The bill is going up but there's no wet patch anywhere because the water is draining into volcanic gravel.
Acoustic detection, thermal imaging, and tracer gas find these. No drilling, no exploratory holes.
The pool checklist
If your bill is up and you have a pool:
- Mark the water level with tape on the skimmer. Check after 24 hours. Top-up rate over 1 cm per day in summer suggests a real leak rather than evaporation.
- With the pump off for 24 hours, mark levels again. If the drop with the pump off is much less than the drop with the pump on, the leak is in the plumbing not the shell.
- Bonded liners can lift away from the shell at the bottom corners — small splits there pour water into the gravel under the deck.
We do all three checks as part of a Lanzarote pool leak survey. No find, no fee.
Old villas and aljibes
If your property is from the 1980s or earlier and the original supply line is galvanised steel, expect that line to start failing somewhere in the next few years if it hasn't already. Pinhole leaks on galvanised mains are one of the most common Leakbusters Lanzarote jobs. The bill goes up first; the wet patch on the patio appears months later if at all.
Aljibes (rainwater cisterns) crack in the floor or the lower walls. A hairline crack drains slowly but constantly into the ground. The mains float valve keeps topping the aljibe up because the level is always low. You can lose 20+ cubic metres a month to a cracked aljibe nobody knew about.
Practical things to do today
- Read your meter when nobody's home or asleep. No water should be moving. If the meter wheel is turning, something is leaking right now.
- Cover the pool when it's not in use. A cover stops 95% of evaporation and chemicals last longer.
- Cut irrigation back to early morning only, 5-7 AM. Daytime watering loses most of it to evaporation before it reaches roots.
- Get a low-flow shower head. Cuts shower water use by 30-50% and you'll barely notice.
When to call us
Call Leakbusters Lanzarote if:
- The bill has gone up and you've ruled out the obvious checks above
- You can hear water running but no tap is on
- A wall or floor has gone damp with no rain
- You can see a wet patch in the garden that won't dry out
- Your pool is losing more than 1 cm a day in summer with the cover off
We're island-wide, bilingual, and no find no fee. If we don't find your leak, you don't pay.