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Water meters

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  • B3B3 Posts: 27,505
    I don't think I could be bothered but I thought some of you might be interested.
    I asked the chap if Thames water checked his calculations. He said that they didn't, but I bet if enough people claimed, they would.
    In London. Keen but lazy.
  • Ferdinand2000Ferdinand2000 Posts: 537
    edited November 2020
    B3 said:
    @strelitzia32 . I haven't looked at your links yet, but the person who mentioned it said the meter cost about £25, 15 years ago and he has saved about £130 a year.
    Apparently he has a big garden and grows vegetables but it can't be that big even in posh outer London.

    Perhaps he's got a rice paddy :-) .

    £130 as a partial reduction makes it a huge amount of water.

    Here I am charged £1.04 per cubic m of water, and sewerage charges are a fraction of that.

    So that suggests he is using 250-'sky's the limit' cubic m of water per year for his hose.

    1 cubic m is a hose or a shower running at a high rate for 3 hours. (5-6l or a gallon+ per minute).

    Needs calculation.

    There are quite a few large (say 1/3-1/2 acre gardens in London without it being millionaires' row) - sometimes they are 200ft+ behind a semi which happens to back onto a railway.

    F

    “Rivers know this ... we will get there in the end.”
  • B3B3 Posts: 27,505
    Maybe he grows watercress too. I've never seen his garden but I remember him complaining about lupin aphids once
    In London. Keen but lazy.
  • PosyPosy Posts: 3,601
    3 hours isn't very much if you have a largish garden. Suppose you have 4 areas you particularly wish to keep watered and each one requires moving the hose to 3 positions. You need to run the water for about an hour in each position and do so perhaps twice a week between May and September. Soon mounts up.
  • edhelkaedhelka Posts: 2,351
    Here I am charged £1.04 per cubic m of water, and sewerage charges are a fraction of that.

    So that suggests he is using 250-'sky's the limit' cubic m of water per year for his hose.
    I envy you. We pay approx. £1.4 for water and £1.65 for sewerage.
    So to save £130 per year, it would be only 79 cubic meters. A lot but not completely unimaginable.
  • BenCottoBenCotto Posts: 4,718
     Or 260 average sized water butts. Expressed that way it seems a very big lot.
    Rutland, England
  • TopbirdTopbird Posts: 8,355
    We live out in the sticks and the rain run-off from the roofs of our 4 bed detached house and double garage feeds (via gutters and pipes) into 3 soakaways located on our land. None of it goes into main drains. 

    2 years ago I claimed and received a fairly sizeable reduction in our sewerage charges because of this. It was a straightforward claim because I provided good supporting evidence and Anglian Water also had the good grace to volunteer to refund me 6 years worth of overpayments🙂.
    Heaven is ... sitting in the garden with a G&T and a cat while watching the sun go down
  • BenCottoBenCotto Posts: 4,718
    On a related matter, if you’re a Blue Badge holder you are probably exempt from any hose pipe ban. I know, a strange thought at this time of year.
    Rutland, England
  • raisingirlraisingirl Posts: 7,093
    Posy said:
    We have had drought for 3 summers. We would need a tank the size of a swimming pool.
    We have had a drought for 3 summers and we have neither mains water nor mains sewers. We have a lot of rainwater stores but most importantly, I have had to adapt what I plant because when we run out, we run out - that's it til it rains again. It completely changes the way you look at the resource - finite and not infinite.
    On the other hand, we don't have a water meter. Or a bill.
    Gardening on the edge of Exmoor, in Devon

    “It's still magic even if you know how it's done.” 
  • Lizzie27Lizzie27 Posts: 12,494
    @Topbird, that's very interesting. We also have a detached house and as far as we know, the rainwater runoff from the roof goes into 3 soakaways. How do we prove it though?  I don't recall anything mentioned in the paperwork. House  was built in 1962.
    North East Somerset - Clay soil over limestone
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