The Water

We’ve lived in the same house since June 2000. Our electricity comes from Florida Power & Light and our water comes from the city of Wellington’s utilities department.

For most of the time we’ve lived here, especially since our daughter moved to Orlando, our total water usage is about 3000 gallons a month. In October, it jumped to 7000 gallons, even though we were gone for several days.. But for November, our usage jumped to nine times that, 27,000 gallons a month. That’s enough to fill a swimming pool!
Rob and I both jumped to the obvious conclusion: a leak, somewhere!

We hired a plumber to come out to the house and check. He found no leaks. A leak detection expert arrived the next day with his sonar equipment and spent hours here, running sonar on every toilet, shower, the washing machine, the water filter device, the ice maker, the pipes outside. Our sprinkling system is well water, so it doesn’t figure in to the gallon count. The expert found 0 leaks.

So we decided to monitor the water meter ourselves. Before we went to bed, we turned off all the water to the house. This morning’s reading said we’d used 30 gallons during the night. How, if there aren’t any leaks?

Later today, a friend sent me the copy of a post from the app Next Door – a woman whose experience was similar to ours. Apparently the city upgraded their meters several months ago. Upgraded to what? Meters that are flawed?

So on Monday morning, I’ll be headed over to the utilities department with the leak detection report that says no leaks were found. And now is it, exactly, that two people, two dogs, and two cats are using 27,000 gallons of water a month?

When this was going on, Rob had been going through old files and ran across a synchronicity about this. The article is from Newsweek, August 8, 1988. The headline is: The Disappearing “Memory” of Water. I think this one is a trickster synchro.

The article is about how in June 1988, researchers announced that independent experiments in four countries “had shown that even when a solution of antibodies is dilated to the point where only water remains, the water acts as if the antibodies are still present.”

In other words, water has a memory. The article was published in Nature and as Newsweek noted, “seemed to validate homeopathy, which holds that minute traces of substances can cure disease.

Keep in mind that all this was written before 2004 when Masaru Emoto wrote Hidden Messages in Water, which contended that human consciousness could affect the molecular structure of water. Emoto, a Japanese businessman, was often referred to as a pseudoscientist by skeptics- the same type of skeptic who back in 1988 claimed this water memory business had “no substantial basis.”

The sleuths included magician James Randi, the guy who debunked anything and everything paranormal and who made his living as a skeptic. When we were freelancing for OMNI Magazine in the late 1980s, we met him. Not impressed. He was full of himself. He died in 2020 at 92. I’ve often wondered what he encountered on the other side, this guy who believed in, well, nothing.

Randi and his fellow sleuths John Maddox and Walter Stewart of the NIH saw this whole thing as a mass delusion. They argued that the researchers had used poor controls and ignored experiments that “didn’t jibe with the ‘water memory’ theory. The lead scientist of the theory, Jacques Benveniste at the University of Paris-South called the investigation a mockery. “He says his inquisitors ignored experiments that worked and used dubious methods to replicate his work.”

So I’m wondering if our water usage issue is related, somehow and somewhere, to this “memory of water.” Thing is, I’m not even sure what that might mean.

PS An update. The guys with the sonar equipment didn’t find a leak. But a master plumber with decades of experience has isolated it to the cabana bathroom. He returns this afternoon to locate the exact spot of the leak. Stay tuned…