Plumbing Peoria IL: The Sewer Bill Is Read Off Somebody Else’s Meter
In most cities the body that treats your wastewater also reads the meter that prices it. Peoria does not work that way and never has. The Greater Peoria Sanitary District, a unit of local government authorised by an election held on 6 June 1927, has no water meters of its own. It buys your consumption data from whichever water company serves your address, and calculates a sewer charge from that.
Follow that arrangement to its end and you arrive at something no other utility we have read asks of a householder. If you want to argue that some of the water you bought never reached the sewer, the District does not send anybody out to check. It tells you to buy a second water meter, install it, own it, maintain it at your own expense, submit to having it sealed against tampering, and then report the readings yourself on your billing cycle.
It even publishes a short list of local shops that stock the meters. Everything below was read in August 2026 from the District and from the City of Peoria, with every source named at the foot.
The Meter You Have To Go And Buy
A Public Body That Asks You To Install Its Instrument And Then Read It For It
The District offers four credits and only the first happens by itself. Single and two family residences get an automatic 7 per cent discount on the user charge rate to allow for unsewered water, and nothing has to be applied for. Everything past that is a form.
The credit meter is the one worth understanding before anybody digs. It is a second water meter, typically fitted for an in ground sprinkler system, a large in ground pool or extensive lawn and garden watering, and the District credits the water it records because none of that water reaches the sewer. The conditions are unusually clear. The meter is the property of the user and must be maintained at the user’s expense. It must be permanently installed. It must meet American Water Works Association construction standards. It must be accessible to District staff.
Then a member of staff comes out, inspects it, seals it against tampering and completes an application form on the spot. From that point the readings are yours to report, on the same schedule as your billing cycle, and the credit must be resubmitted every year or, in the District’s words, the credit shall be deemed waived. A meter fitted once and forgotten stops paying after twelve months.
There is a second option that most people never hear about. Instead of metering the water that does not reach the sewer, you can meter the water that does, which the District calls a billing meter, and it then bills from your readings rather than from the water company’s reading at all.
The Sanitary District Publishes A Buying Guide, Which Almost Nobody Does
Having asked householders to buy a measuring instrument, the District then does the obvious decent thing and tells them how. It names three local suppliers who have told it they stock meters for retail sale: Hi-Line Supply Co at 403 E. Lake St in Peoria, Sidener Inc at 115 N. Cummings Ln in Washington, and Sheridan Nursery at 3823 N. Sheridan Rd in Peoria. A nursery on a sewer authority’s supplier list tells you what these meters are usually for.
It suggests a licensed plumber or plumbing contractor does the installation, and then sets out twelve points for anybody who insists on doing it themselves. Four of them are the ones that actually go wrong.
The read out must be in cubic feet unless the meter is installed in series with gallon meters. A gallon read out bought off the shelf is a conversion argument every quarter.
A plastic meter connected to metal piping needs a grounding wire run to bypass it. The District says plastic is cheaper and corrosion resistant and bronze is more durable, and then flags the electrical continuity problem that the cheaper choice creates.
The meter must be sited where it cannot freeze, and if that is impossible it must be removable or capable of being drained. In central Illinois that is not a footnote.
Sediment, silt and scale interfere with the mechanism, so a strainer ahead of the meter belongs on any well fed or boiler discharge installation, and a meter at a well head should be specified for pressure extremes.
Two more are easy to miss and cost the whole exercise. The meter needs a direction of flow arrow, and it needs to be specified for hot water if it will ever see any, because a standard water meter is a cold water instrument. If the reason you are considering all of this is a bill that climbed without explanation, start with our guide to leak detection before you start pricing meters, because an unsewered credit is not the cure for a supply leak.
A Prohibition, Not A Rebate
Peoria Did Not Encourage Householders Out Of Basement Gravity Drainage. It Banned It.
Sanitary facilities in a basement here must drain into a dedicated sewage pump and be lifted to the building sewer at ground level. The District states the effect in the strongest terms available to an engineer: the policy effectively eliminates all sewage backups into basements, whether the blockage is in the building sewer or the District’s own sewer is flooding.
That is a different kind of rule from the ones this site has covered elsewhere in Illinois. Our Arlington Heights page covers the largest homeowner plumbing subsidy we have recorded, and our Calumet City page covers a smaller one with an order of operations that voids it if you get it wrong. Both are incentives to convert. Peoria closed the question for new construction thirty years ago and then set about buying out the houses that predate it.
Two cost share programmes exist for those older houses and they are priced identically, at 75 per cent of the replumbing up to $3,500. One is run by the District and one by the City. They are not alternatives you choose between. Which one you may apply to is decided by which body owns the sewer main your building sewer connects to, and the City states plainly that you must be connected to a City owned main to qualify for its version.
The City runs one more that the District does not. It reimburses 75 per cent of the cost to purchase and install a combination gate check valve in a basement sewer pipe, for any installation up to $1,200, which is a far smaller job than a full conversion and worth asking about by name.
Somebody Has Had A Sketch Of Your Private Drain Since 1937
The District keeps maps and records of the public sanitary sewer system, which is ordinary. What is not ordinary is the next clause. Those records include sketches of almost all building sewers constructed in the District since 1937, and a building sewer is the private pipe from your house to the public main. A property owner can obtain a copy by contacting the Planning and Construction Department.
Read what that means before a shovel goes in the ground. On most jobs the location of a private drain is a matter of probing, camera work and educated guessing, and the cost of guessing wrong is measured in yards of trench. Here there may already be a drawing. It will not be perfect, and the District says so: limited information is available for building sewers constructed before 1937, and for areas where sewers were built outside the District and later annexed.
The District maintains a file of sanitary sewer easements alongside the sketches, which answers the other expensive question, namely whether somebody else’s pipe crosses your garden. Electronic records need a Release of Liability for Files and Drawings form and a detailed map of the extent of the data requested.
And the arrangement runs both ways. If repairs or modifications are made to a building sewer, the District asks the owner to tell it so the records can be updated. That is a request rather than a requirement, and it is the reason a set of drawings begun before the Second World War is still worth reading today. Where the sketch shows a run under a sidewalk or a street, note that the pipe there is still yours, which changes what sewer line repair costs rather than who is responsible for it.
Who To Ring, And What Follows
A Free Inspection, A Closed Contractor List, And A Warning About Ringing Too Often
Both bodies print the same instruction about the order of the calls, and this site has already written that argument out properly on other pages, so it is stated here once as a fact and left alone. What is worth building on is everything that happens afterwards.
The District will inspect the public sanitary sewer serving the property at no cost to the owner. If a problem is found there, it is repaired. If the public sewer is clear, the owner is told the problem is on the private side. The District publishes its reasoning for wanting the call in the first place, and it is not about billing: it says it has had problems in the past where a plumber was called, did work in the private building sewer and caused harm to the public main.
The condition on the private repair is the part that narrows your options. All repair work must be done by a contractor licensed and bonded by the District, and all repair work must be inspected by the District, with that inspection free of charge. A contractor licensed by the state and unknown to the District is not automatically eligible, which is a question worth asking before the quotation rather than after.
Two smaller warnings sit in the same place. Never open a manhole or any other District structure, because only District personnel are authorised to. And the District reserves the right to cease responding to, or to bill an owner for, repeated calls relating to private building sewers, which turns a recurring blockage from an annoyance into a cost.
The Leak Credit Has A Clock, And The City Does Not License Plumbers At All
The leak credit is discretionary in terms. The District says a credit may be given in its sole and absolute discretion, and then sets six conditions that decide whether the request is even considered. The District must be contacted and the completed application received within six months of the leak. An adjustment is allowed on an account only once every twelve months. The application must be completed in full. Repair receipts must be included or no adjustment will be given. Any past due charges must be paid in full before the account can be put on hold. And once an adjustment is granted, the balance is payable in thirty days.
The receipt condition is the one that catches households who fixed the leak themselves or paid somebody in cash. Keep the invoice. Where a credit is granted it is calculated the same way as the once a year credit, as water use in excess of your calculated average sewered use, less any year round unsewered discount you already receive.
The licensing picture is the other thing worth knowing early, because it surprises people moving in from other states. The City of Peoria issues trade licences to electrical contractors and to heating and air conditioning contractors, at $150 non refundable, valid for one calendar year and expiring on 31 December. It issues boiler tender and stationary engineer licences too. It does not issue a plumbing trade licence, because Illinois licenses plumbers at state level rather than city level.
Where the City does license a trade, two conditions apply that are stricter than most. Licences are issued to individuals rather than to businesses, and only the contractor who holds the City licence can apply for permits and must be present for all scheduled inspections. Reciprocity exists with exactly two places, Normal and Pekin, and everyone else supplies an ICC contractor test certificate for a 2017 or newer code cycle, the test being open book with the fees paid by the applicant.
Sixty Six Square Miles, 716 Miles Of Sewer, And No Property Tax Since 1980
The Greater Peoria Sanitary and Sewage Disposal District serves roughly 66 square miles and treats wastewater collected from 716 miles of sewer, from a plant at 2322 South Darst Street. The municipalities served are Peoria, Peoria Heights, Bartonville, West Peoria and Bellevue, plus adjacent unincorporated areas, and an industrial area near Mapleton is served by agreement. If your address is outside that list, none of the District rules on this page apply to you.
It began treating sewage in May 1931, with a process of physical separation followed by biological treatment, and it states that although there have been significant improvements the original processes remain in use today. During 2020 it treated an average of 25 million gallons a day and removed over 95 per cent of the oxygen demanding organics.
Two facts about how it is funded change how a bill should be read. The District states it has not levied a real estate tax since 1980, so the user charge is the whole of it. And a Peoria city address carries two extra lines that are not the District’s money at all: a City of Peoria Sewer Charge for maintaining City owned sanitary sewers, and a Peoria Sewer Rehabilitation charge for improving them. The District collects both and returns the revenue to the City, and the rates are set by City Council rather than by the District board.
Residential accounts are normally billed quarterly and commercial accounts monthly, and the District bills the property owner of record at the Peoria County Recorder’s Office, which matters to landlords more than to tenants. Rates vary by geographical area, because three different water providers operate inside the service area and the District purchases consumption data from each of them.
The Inspection That Has To Happen Before The Trench Is Filled
The District inspects all building sewers to verify compliance with its ordinance requirements and construction standards, and it fixes the moment precisely: after pipe installation and before the trench is back filled. The consequence is printed in the same paragraph, and it is the reason this belongs in a quotation rather than in a footnote. Re excavation will be required when a trench is back filled prior to inspection by the District.
Building sewers here leave residences through four inch and six inch pipe, and the Building Sewer Regulations and Engineering General Specifications that govern them took effect on 1 January 2026. Two further ordinances, on industrial pretreatment and sewer use and on charges for the discharge of domestic, commercial and industrial wastes, took effect on 27 June 2026. Anybody working from a copy printed before those dates is working from the wrong document.
New service is not simply a matter of connecting. A prospective customer must have an available sanitary sewer system, be annexed into the corporate limits of the District, and pay the fees. Where an existing main is immediately adjacent, a direct connection is possible once fees are paid and a permit obtained. Where it is not, the sewer has to be extended, which means plans approved by the District and a construction permit from the Illinois EPA before anything is built.
One commercial deadline is worth carrying because it is a date rather than an argument. Dental practices that remove or replace amalgam are regulated by the District as the local Control Authority, and separators installed before 14 June 2017 satisfy the standard only until they are replaced or until 14 June 2027, whichever comes sooner.
Peoria sewer and plumbing questions, answered from the published rules
Every answer below comes from a document the Greater Peoria Sanitary District or the City of Peoria publishes, read in August 2026, with the source named at the foot of the page.
The Greater Peoria Sanitary District, which is a separate unit of local government from the City and from your water company. It has no meters of its own, so it purchases water consumption data from the water provider serving your address and calculates the user charge from that. Residential accounts are normally billed quarterly and commercial accounts monthly, and the bill goes to the property owner recorded at the Peoria County Recorder’s Office.
Yes, four ways. Single and two family homes already receive an automatic 7 per cent discount for unsewered water with nothing to apply for. Beyond that there is a once a year credit for a single large use such as filling a pool or watering new sod, a credit meter for continuous unsewered use such as an in ground sprinkler system, and a leak credit. The District states it reserves the right to change or reject any credit request at any time.
It is a second water meter that measures water which never reaches the sewer, and you own it. The District states the meter is the property of the user and must be maintained at the user’s expense, permanently installed, built to American Water Works Association standards and accessible to District staff. A staff member inspects it, seals it against tampering and completes an application form, after which you report the readings on your billing cycle. Credits must be submitted annually or they are deemed waived.
Six months. The District must be contacted and the completed application received within six months of the leak, an adjustment is allowed only once every twelve months on an account, and repair receipts must be included or no adjustment will be given. Any past due charges have to be paid in full before the account can be placed on hold, and once an adjustment is granted the balance is due within thirty days.
Because the District’s policy only serves sanitary facilities at ground level and above. Basement fixtures must drain into a dedicated sewage pump and be lifted to the building sewer, which is commonly called an overhead sewer arrangement. The District states this effectively eliminates sewage backups into basements whether the blockage is in the building sewer or its own sewer is flooding. Note that the District’s page dates the policy to 1994 and the City’s page dates it to 1 January 1995, and we have not tried to reconcile the two.
Yes, and there are two programmes priced identically at 75 per cent of the plumbing cost up to $3,500. One is run by the Sanitary District and one by the City of Peoria, and which one applies to you depends on which body owns the sewer main you connect to. The City states you must be connected to a City owned main to qualify for its version. Separately, the City reimburses 75 per cent of the cost of a combination gate check valve in a basement sewer pipe for any installation up to $1,200.
Quite possibly. The District keeps sketches of almost all building sewers constructed in its area since 1937, and a property owner can request a copy from the Planning and Construction Department. Coverage is limited for pipes laid before 1937 and for areas that were sewered outside the District and annexed later. The District also keeps a file of sanitary sewer easements, and asks owners to report repairs or modifications so the records stay current.
Both the District and the City print the same instruction about calling the District before a plumber, and the reason the District gives is that work done in a private building sewer has damaged the public main in the past. The inspection of the public sewer serving your property is free. If the public sewer is clear, the problem is private and yours, and the repair must be done by a contractor licensed and bonded by the District, with a free District inspection of the work.
No. The City issues trade licences to electrical contractors, heating and air conditioning contractors, boiler tenders and stationary engineers, but not to plumbers, because Illinois licenses plumbers at state level. Where the City does license a trade, the licence goes to an individual rather than a business, only the licence holder can pull permits, and that person must be present for all scheduled inspections. Reciprocity exists only with Normal and Pekin.
The inspection before back filling. The District inspects all building sewers after pipe installation and before the trench is filled, and states that re excavation will be required if a trench is back filled first. Work to the Building Sewer Regulations and Engineering General Specifications effective 1 January 2026, and if the job involves a new connection rather than a replacement, expect annexation, fees and a permit before anything is laid.
What this page refused to say, and why
The obvious Peoria page is a combined sewer overflow page. The City publishes a whole section on it and we did not open a line of it, because combined sewers are covered properly on this site already, including in this state on our Chicago page and our Arlington Heights page. A second version would be a different phrasing rather than a different finding.
The 75 per cent cost share is the same story. Arlington Heights owns the argument about what a large subsidy does to a household decision, and our Calumet City page owns the version where the order of operations voids the money. Peoria’s figure appears above because a reader needs it, and the argument is left where it belongs. What is built here instead is the thing neither of them has, which is a jurisdiction that prohibited basement gravity drainage outright and then ran two parallel buyouts for the houses that predate the ban.
The instruction to call the sewer authority before a plumber is stated once as a fact and no argument is drawn from it, because that argument is already written elsewhere on this site. The dental amalgam regime is named and not built on for the same reason. And no water quality figure appears anywhere above, which here is close to structural: the sanitary district is not a water utility, three separate water companies serve its area, and the largest of them reserves its site against automated readers, so nothing was taken from it.
Where the two authorities disagree, we printed both. The District dates its basement policy to 1994 and the City dates it to 1 January 1995. We did not choose, because the choice decides whether a house built in that window is eligible for a conversion grant, and only the District can answer that for a specific address.
Sources, and how this page was researched
Everything above was read in August 2026. From the Greater Peoria Sanitary District: Credit Information for the four credits and the 7 per cent automatic discount, Credit Meter Information for the ownership and maintenance conditions, the sealing, the annual resubmission rule, the named suppliers and the twelve installation points, Unsewered Credit and Leak Credit for the two application regimes.
Backup Relief Programs carries the 1994 date and the 75 per cent up to $3,500 conversion programme, Preventing Sewer Backups the private ownership statement and the contractor complaints, and Sewer Emergencies the free public sewer inspection, the licensed and bonded requirement, the manhole warning and the repeated calls clause. Understanding Your Bill carries the three water providers, the City charges and the 1980 tax statement, Existing Connections the sketches since 1937 and the easement file, New Connections the inspection before back filling, Ordinances and Regulations the effective dates, About the 1927 election, the acreage, the mileage and the treatment history, and Dental Amalgam Compliance the 2027 sunset.
From the City of Peoria: Sanitary Sewer Information carries the City backup programmes, the gate check valve reimbursement, the ownership of the building sewer beneath the right of way and the 1 January 1995 date, and Trade Licenses the licensed trades, the fees, the individual licensing rule, the attendance requirement and the reciprocity list.
Elsewhere on this site, our Illinois overview covers state licensing and the freeze calendar, our Rockford page covers a different northern Illinois utility structure, our sump pump services page covers the pumped drainage this city requires in a basement, drain cleaning and emergency plumbing cover the work itself, and our guide to preventing frozen pipes matters here because a credit meter that cannot be drained will not survive a central Illinois winter.