Your water charges reflect the costs of cleaning and delivering safe, high quality drinking water to your home. Your sewer charges reflect the costs of collecting wastewater, transporting it to a wastewater treatment plant, cleaning the water to almost drinking water quality, then returning it to the Trinity River. The cleanliness standards for both drinking water and treated sewage are set by the state and federal governments. By lowering your water costs during the winter months, you can actually lower your bills all year long. How does that work?

1. YOUR WATER USE IS METERED

To ensure that customers are charged fairly for water, City of Lewisville uses meters to measure water use. All water customers have water meters of various sizes based on their needs.

2. SEWER USE IS ESTIMATED

Because it is not cost effective to meter sewer use, the City estimates it. To estimate sewer use, the City uses your winter months average (the average of your water billed in December, January, February and March). This is thought to be the best time to average because customers water their lawns less in the winter and therefore irrigation water is not inflating the amount of water which is actually going into the sanitary sewer. However, if a customer’s current month’s actual water use is less than the winter months’ average, the customer’s sewer bill is based on the actual water use.

3. HOW YOUR RESIDENTIAL WINTER MONTHS SEWER AVERAGE IS CALCULATED

Your water use for bills issued during the months of December, January, February and March is totaled. Your average daily water use is calculated by dividing the above total water use by the total number of days of service for bills issued during December, January, February and March. Your winter months’ average is calculated by multiplying your daily winter water use average by the average number of days in a month (30.416 days, except for a leap year, which is 30.5 days).