An Aurora Water continuous flow alert is triggered when the meter at your property records nonstop water use for at least 24 hours straight. You set these alerts up yourself in Aurora Water’s water customer portal, and they arrive by email or text. The point is to catch a possible leak or a fixture left running before it lands on your bill.
In a typical home, water use drops to zero at some point in the day. Overnight, while everyone is asleep, no faucet, toilet, or sprinkler zone should be pulling water, so a meter that never stops is a real signal, not a glitch.
The reason this alert exists is Aurora Water’s newer metering system, called Advanced Meter Infrastructure. These meters send readings daily instead of monthly, and you can see your use down to the hour, which is what makes leak tracking possible. When the meter sees water moving through it for a full 24-hour stretch with no pause, the system flags it. That is unusual for a single-family home, and it can mean one of a handful of things: a toilet that keeps refilling, a hose bib or valve left open, an irrigation line stuck on, or a hidden leak somewhere in your supply piping. The alert tells you something is running. It does not tell you what, and it does not fix it. Finding and repairing the problem is on you, not the city.
One local wrinkle matters here. Much of the Aurora area has clay soil that can swell when wet and shrink when dry, and that movement can stress buried water lines and pipe joints over time. Add in older homes like those in Original Aurora, between 6th and 25th avenues from Yosemite Street to Peoria Street, where water lines installed in 1960 or earlier can be galvanized steel that corrodes from the inside, and a slow underground leak can run for a long time without ever surfacing in the yard. That is exactly the kind of leak a continuous flow alert is built to expose. If you think a hidden leak is behind your alert, our leak detection and repair in Aurora is built for exactly that.
What should I do when I get a continuous flow alert?
Start by treating it as real and walk your property with the meter in mind. First, shut off every water fixture you can and see if the meter is still moving. If it is, water is going somewhere it should not. Check the usual suspects in this order:
- Toilets, since a running toilet often makes no sound at all
- Faucets and hose bibs, indoors and out, for anything left cracked open
- Your irrigation system for a stuck valve or a broken sprinkler head
- The water heater, softener, and any line running to a fridge or humidifier
Aurora Water recommends a quick toilet check that anyone can do: put a few drops of food coloring in the tank and wait about 15 minutes without flushing. If color shows up in the bowl, the flapper is leaking and needs replacing. You can also log into Aurora Water’s water customer portal at MyAccount.AuroraWater.org, which shows your water use down to the hour, because the pattern often points you to when the water is running. If the meter keeps moving after everything is off, the leak may be in your supply piping and not a fixture you can see.
How do I know what’s causing a continuous flow?
The usage graph in your Aurora Water portal is a good place to start reading the cause. Continuous flow shows up as a flat, steady line of use that never drops to zero, even at 3 a.m. A toilet flapper leak can look like small, repeating bumps as the tank refills. Irrigation problems can spike during your watering window, then keep dribbling after it should have shut off. A hidden supply leak can read as a constant baseline that runs day and night at the same rate.
Once you have a rough idea from the graph, confirm it at the fixture. Dye-test the toilets, look under sinks and behind the toilet base for moisture, and check the floor around the water heater. Outside, walk the yard for a soft or unusually green patch, which can mark a buried line weeping into Aurora’s clay soil. Since Aurora winters can bring hard freezes, also check any pipe that runs through an unheated crawl space or an exterior wall, since a hairline crack from a past freeze can leak steadily once the line thaws.
What if I can’t find the source of the continuous flow?
If your meter keeps running after you have shut off every fixture and still cannot find water, the leak is likely hidden, and that is where a professional leak detection service in Aurora comes in. Hidden leaks can sit in places you cannot see: under a slab, inside a wall, or in the buried service line between your home and the city’s main, which is yours to maintain. A steady, unexplained continuous flow with nothing visible often points to exactly that kind of leak.
Chasing it without opening walls or digging blindly takes the right equipment. A pro uses acoustic listening gear to hear water escaping under pressure, along with pressure testing to isolate which section of line is failing, so the leak gets pinpointed before anything is cut open. That matters most on a buried line, where guessing wrong means digging up the wrong stretch of yard. If the trouble turns out to be the supply piping itself, corroded galvanized lines, which some older Aurora homes still have, sometimes call for repiping a failing section rather than patching a spot that will just leak again a few feet down. Getting an accurate diagnosis first is what keeps a hidden leak from turning into a torn-up floor.
Can I get my Aurora Water bill adjusted after a leak?
You might. Aurora Water has a leak adjustment credit policy, and a leak on your property can qualify you for a one-month billing adjustment. To qualify, your account must be current and in good standing, your water use must have doubled from the same period last year, and you need receipts showing the leak was repaired. Aurora Water can also inspect the property to check the leak or the repair.
You have to ask within 90 days of finding the leak, and Aurora Water grants only one leak adjustment in a 12-month period. The credit depends in part on how much extra water the leak used, and it covers a portion of that overage, not the whole bill. To request one, call the Aurora Water billing office at 303.739.7388, or log into your water customer portal and fill out a Leak Adjustment Report. Keep your plumber’s invoice and parts receipts until the adjustment is settled.
A continuous flow alert in Aurora usually means water is quietly running somewhere, and between our clay soil and older galvanized supply lines, the source can be buried where you cannot see it. At Superior Mile High Plumbing, we handle leak detection and plumbing leak repair in Aurora, tracking down hidden leaks with acoustic and pressure testing, then repairing the line so your meter stops spinning and your next bill looks normal again. If your alert has you stumped, send us a message or call (303) 304-0784, and we will track down the source.