The Brad Hole

One:

A few weeks back, the city of Phoenix stuck a notice on our door saying we probably had a water leak, to the tune of 1.5 gallons of flow an hour. We did a check around the house and noticed nothing. A few days later, we got a $220 water bill. That's $170 higher than normal, so clearly we had a problem. :) We went around looking and finally found the culprit - the valve for our drip system was stuck open and all of our bushes were getting non-stop water for god-knows how long. It's hot and not so humid here, and the water flow for each drip wasn't enormous, so it was hard to spot initially as there are no streams of water running away from anything.

Two:

May: $149, June: $400, July: $600. Those are our past 3 electric bills. I had chalked the large June bill up to it just being hot and our house being older, but the July bill nearly caused me to have a heart attack. Our AC unit (which sits on top of our roof) is the original from when the house was built, 23 years ago. Apparently it's never had the coils cleaned, and as a result it has grossly restricted airflow and also leaks water onto our roof which then drips down onto our patio. Net result: it runs far more frequently and puts out far less cold air than it should. It's pretty expensive to replace it (to the tune of at least $4000), but we're going to have the coils cleaned tomorrow and, we're told, that should make a considerable difference until we're able to replace the unit outright - hopefully early next spring.