Flat rate electricity like water?

[alan_m]

You are not looking hard enough for the best deals then.

[trader_4]

How do you know what most people have and where are those people? UK? US? Africa?

And it means you're not constantly thinking "I mustn't flush the toilet I can't afford it".

It would be rare for people to be that concerned or obsessed with it. But it would have people thinking twice about running their lawn sprinklers ever day or other unnecessary usage. IT encourages them to put on rain sensors or ground moisture sensors so that sprinklers only run when really needed. You can go through thousands of gallons each time.

[trader_4]

e:

use), why isn't the same true of electricity? Both cost the company more i f you use more.

try to turn the tap off immediately you've used it, don't want to water the garden, etc? Or you don't want to rinse out food containers for recycling , because you have to pay to do so? If I had to pay for my water, nothing at all would ever be recycled. I ain't paying for it!

n? Don't you stop and think "can the plants survive without this cost"?

to having metering is there? The only reason they put it there is to make people use less.

Yes there is a point. It has the people who use more water, paying more of the cost than those who use less. Are you dense? It would be like having one flat price for a month of gasoline, take as much as you wan t. It costs money to buy water, pump it, process it, build reservoirs, install and maintain the infrastructure.

[dpb]

Look at a map; where those lakes are is quite far removed from most of the US; much of the US has only subsurface water even if not desert...

Routinely; we write the electricity bill every month one of which includes the well...it is what it is. We irrigate quite a lot in summer as is a pretty low annual rainfall area (average ~16" per year).

[James Wilkinson Sword]

On Sat, 31 Mar 2018 15:51:34 +0100, trader_4 wro= te:

But it works fine in most of the UK where you pay a fixed rate (more if = you have a larger house, so a single OAP in a council flat isn't paying = for a family of 6 in a mansion). Think how much they save on meters, ma= intainence of meters, reading of meters, billing paperwork, etc.

-- =

There are forty =A3100 million notes in the Bank of England.

[James Wilkinson Sword]

It's a fact that green power generation does not make as much profit as nuclear or coal.

[James Wilkinson Sword]

Word of mouth, newspapers.

UK. Why would that matter?

But it isn't unnecessary or they wouldn't be doing it anyway. Why should I have a brown lawn because of a meter?

And the cost of those is?

Water is a renewable resource. Just make more dams. The resulting lakes can be used for watersports, places for birds to nest, etc.

[James Wilkinson Sword]

And yet most of the UK is doing just fine on flat rate water. We don't just throw it out the window.

[James Wilkinson Sword]

I guess there is ONE benefit of living on a soggy island then. Even if water prices skyrocketed, I could easily collect enough for me to use from my own land. Just from the gutters from the house roof would be enough for my consumption, and to save up to water the garden in dry months.

Perhaps one day we'll have nuclear fission/fusion everywhere and huge amounts of energy and we won't have to think how much we use.

[gfretwell]

On Sat, 31 Mar 2018 15:36:59 +0100, "James Wilkinson Sword" wrote:

The problem with your whole scenario is we have problem with not having enough water in a large part of the world and that is also true in most of the US. If you have been paying any attention at all you know west of the Rockies most of the area is a desert that was irrigated by the big FDR era dams but they are using the water faster than the dams can fill back up every year. In the central US the main water supply is the fossil water in the Ogalalla aquifer and they have pumped that down by 500 feet just in my lifetime. We even have problems down here in Florida because they are pumping down the aquifers so fast that they are being back filled with sea water. My well runs about 500 PPM salt right now. You would get your minimum daily requirement of salt by drinking a quart of water. Hence I need an RO and that is also how a lot of the municipal water is processed. It costs over a penny a gallon so people do think about how much it costs to water their garden or lawn. I have a well but if I had "city water" I would pay $36.59 just to have the water and sewer pipe here, plus $44.16 for the first 6000 gallons, $48.84 for the next 6000 gallons, $52.52 for the next 6000 gallons and .97 cents a gallon for everything over that. (combined water and sewer based on water use)

If you have 10,000 square feet of lawn and you put the typical 1/2 inch of water a week on it you are talking over $100 a month just to water the grass. Lots of people use twice that amount.

[trader_4]

Nuff said. I should have known not to try to engage in a reasonable discussion with the village idiot troll. Over and out.

[rbowman]

When you live someplace where the definition of a drought is no rain in two weeks, water isn't too important.

We refer to 43 days without precipitation as a dry spell.

[rbowman]

Most of which are east of the 100th meridian.

Note the qualifier 'freshwater'.

It's more than eight times as large but at 27% salinity nothing lives in it but brine shrimp.

[James Wilkinson Sword]

They don't have this problem in Dubai, they just desalinate the sea water. Is the USA too poor to do this?

[James Wilkinson Sword]

Not my fault if your country has a water shortage.

[James Wilkinson Sword]

It ain't a drought, I ignore all "hosepipe bans" and all that shit. This country is soggy, there's plenty of water. Any shortage is due to mismanagement by the water companies and I don't care.

[rbowman]

Right. Even the people from the eastern US don't understand western water law. It has evolved for more than 100 years to settle water disputes with something other than deadly weapons.

Look at a map of the world. People either live where there is abundant water or spend huge amounts to bring it in from someplace else like the Califoria system of aqueducts, reservoirs, and pumping stations.

Too much water can be a problem, too. Consider Doggerland.

[Clare Snyder]

Flat rate water is fast becoming a dinasaur as well.

Up here the water rate is almost as bad as the hydro rate - and we pay a sewer charge equal to the water rate, plus a stormwater rate dependent on lot size and catchment features.

[Ed Pawlowski]

I flush as needed and wash my car too. It is cheap enough to use what I want freely and I don't subsidize the gluttons.

There are two of us. Why should I pay for a family of 8 that fills their pool and over waters their lawn?

[Clare Snyder]

Tell that to customers of Ontario's Hydro One - Bruce Power, Pickering, Darlington, et al are NOT "cheap power" - at least theway HydroOne operates.