Photo by Mr. Glos

Is your toilet running?

No, really. D.C. Water wants to know if your toilet is wasting water, because if it is, you’ll probably end up with a staggeringly steep water bill. In a new YouTube video, the utility’s mascot, Wendy Waterdrop, is issuing a warning about the pricey effects of a broken commode.

In the clip, D.C. Water officials—Wendy, a giant anthropomorphic waterdrop, can’t actually speak—describe the symptoms and results of a faulty toilet. A leaky toilet might not send water seeping across the floor or even over the rim of the bowl. Instead, the damage is done inside the tank, when the valve that regulates the toilet’s supply of water fails to close and just keeps running, and at quite the free-flowing pace to boot.

D.C. Water says that the average toilet uses about a gallon of water per minute while it’s running. Left unchecked, that adds up to 1,440 gallons a day. At a D.C. Water’s rate of about penny per gallon, that’s about $14 a day; a toilet that runs continuously for a month would tack on an extra $420 to a residential water bill. And that, frankly, would be a real shitty thing to see on an invoice. (Pun so intended.)

Anyway, watch D.C. Water’s brief guide to lowering your toilet-induced water costs. The music cues at the beginning and end come from Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes song “Janglia,” because when you think of Edward Sharpe, you think of the toilet: