The devil has to pay back what he stole from me!

Over the past few months my water bill had been escallating - and I do not just mean the dollar amount, but the volume of water consumed in my household shot up from a mere 30-35 cubic metres per month to a whopping 125 cubic metres over a period of about six months.

True, we did a major home renovation - change out the toilet seats in the house and re-sited some taps and also put in a booster water pump - back in late May/June period and I kept thinking that the pump was faulty, running at odd hours of the day and not as on demand. And so I 'summoned' my contractor and insisted that he fixed my pump issue because the water pressure did not improve and still water usage went skyrocketing. And the innocent man kept insisting that there was basically nothing wrong with the pump.

Well, my patience ran out two weeks ago when I received my last water bill for October and i was totally disgusted - metre read was 165 cu metre for October and 85 cu metre estimated for September thus averaging 125. So, enough is enough and I decided to alert the PUB (Public Utilities Board) to complain that they were overcharging me. The lady at the call centre suggested that I contact the PUB Water Leakage Detection Department and have their technicians come in and do some detective work to establish where the leak was.

For a certainty the leakage was not within the house otherwise all my cupboards, concrete walls and flooring would have been thoroughly soaked but this was not so. And true enough, the technicians detected a very loud gushing sound in the garden area but they were not confident to pinpoint the location. So, here we go and activated the contractor who sent two of his workers to dig up the garden up the the place where they could see some exposed pipe but on close examination, the copper pipe was dry as a bone on the exterior.

Back to the drawing board and the PUB guys were called in for a second time to locate the leak. This time the technicians not only brought in their 'hearing aid' (one long pipe with an enlarged earpiece) but a water 'stretoscope' and hooked up their computer to locate the breaks in the water flow. Guess what, they located the spot but off by 60cmn and they were so confident that they found the spot that they wanted to leave but I held them back so that they could brief my contractor the location.

When the contractor came after 10 minutes, I had the PUB guys replicate what they did to show the spot again but the euphoria was short-lived. They did not get the same results but tried to explain what they did and the results. But my contractor was not satisfied. He basically did not want to break up the wall to locate the leak as that would have been very messy and so, after after 10 minutes of useless discussion and speculation, he decided to dig at a particular spot to check one pipe and, bingo just 2 cm down the punctured pipe was exposed and it was a huge leak and so the repairs were done that afternoon itself.

You know the power of prayer says it all. As the PUB guys were discussing with my contractor, I was busy praying for wisdom for my contractor to locate and quickly fix the leakage. I was very confident that the leakage was not in some place concealed behind walls as the sound certainly did not match and praise the Lord for the quick locating of the spot and the fixing of the pipes.

As I thought about the whole incident, I am claiming restoration from the devil. he stole 95 cu metres of water over the past nine to twelve months and multiply that with a rough price of S$2.20 (including water levy charges) and the wastage is well over S$2,500. And I am claiming a sevenfold restoration in accordance with Proverbs 6:30-31.
v30 Men do not despise a thief if he steals to satisfy his hunger when he is starving.
v31 Yet if he is caught, he must pay SEVENFOLD, though it costs him all the wealth of his house.

So devil, it is restoration time and I am expecting the money to come in very shortly! He should know better than to touch the anointed child of Abba Daddy for he can never win.