OT: Water bills

Useful to know.

I wonder if that would be as easy to achieve where supplied water is from one company but sewage is the responsibility of another? We are on a septic tank but where the sewage system starts a couple of miles away Wessex water handle that but Bournemouth Water now a subsidiary of SouthWest are the suppliers. Wessex do offer a £27 per annum discount they call a rainwater allowance if you can satisfy them that a quantity does not reach their system but is used on the ground.

A friend whose flower growing hobby meant he had greenhouses almost the size of commercial ones would have saved a lot over the years, unfortunately he is no longer in a condition to continue so I won’t suggest it.

GH

From Wessex water

a typical unmetered bill (based on the average property rateable value) will be 24% higher this year, compared to 2024-25.

It would probably be best to ring up Wessex and ask them if they'd take a meter reading on a garden tap as proof it had not gone through the sewage system.

FWIW I've used about 8500 litres in the last 3 weeks. That's around £20 saved on sewerage charges. If the lack of rain continues here I'll be using the same amount or even more in the next few weeks.

Inside the house.

I didn't know that you could that. I must check whether STW does the same. As it happens, I *have* got a neter on my garden tap. I bought it originally to meter the whole house to see whether it was worth having an official fitted - which it was. When my meter became redundant for its original purpose, I moved it to the garden tap to keep an eye on how much I was using for watering.

It's best to check by phoning STW. I can't remember how I discovered the sewerage allowance. I just searched the SW website and couldn't find it! Same with the STW website...

It's not surprising they "hide" these things, as a lot of customers are paying well over the odds for something they're not using. :-(

Do you need an 'official' meter (from the supplier, calibrated etc) or will they accept the reading from a third party meter?

Theo

Last time I looked it up 5+ years ago, the water rates for a similar neighbouring property were much higher than 'normal' consumption in a full house. Obviously usage will vary, but if you're just taking normal showers and baths and not watering the garden or filling pools, I suspect metering is going to be a good bit cheaper.

Theo

My meter was supplied by the plumber. It was this (the blue one for cold water):

I guess you could supply and fit your own providing that it's WRAS approved.

I've had a Severn Trent water meter since November 2023 and only recently learned of the existance of the usage tracker but am unable to access it. I've messaged ST to try and find out why. (They've just issued my first bill using a reading taken from the meter, 12 months since the last bill.)

They were nationalised for centuries and after a big investment by the Victorians, subsequently little or nothing was spent and water bills were peanuts for far too long which didn't even cover running repairs, never mind improvements.

All around the South coast, raw sewage was just dumped into the sea, and not even piped far enough out to prevent contamination of that bit of the sea just offshore. At least now some treatment is done and apart from after spells of heavy rain there seems to be less contamination of bathing water.

Well, mid-late 19C once the relationship between poor sanitation and disease had been established.

Which makes mid-80s privatisation all the more daft.

You're saying the water infrastructure in England/Wales received effectively no maintenance or improvement since say 1900? Interesting, did not know that. The same in Scotland - which is of course nationalised (and significantly less expensive than England)?

Do you have a source of that info? I know a fair bit about 19C/early 20C and post privatisation, but very little about the bit in between.

All of that still happens. Anyway, nationalisation and 'decent services' are not mutually exclusive. And I think privatisation has been given a decent run, and shown not to work.

That was the problem with a lot of Nationalised utilities. When things get politically tough it was too easy to "save money" by not investing in the infrastructure. By the time the s*it hits the fan the likelihood was that the politician will have moved on and it was someone else's problem. When water was privatised there was a large amount of money required to repair a very leaky infrastructure in a very ageing system and the Government didn't have enough taxpayers money to do so. The solution was to privatise the system to use someone else's money.

Another part of the problem is that the regulators have failed miserably to their jobs over rge decades. The same with the public facing part of the electricity industry - failing to vet "suppliers" that were not financially viable.

The same with the public facing bit of the railways, decades of under investment resulted in many lines having rolling stock well past the sell by date. Even when some of this has been brought back into public ownership the warnings have been given is that fares will not reduce and much more money from ticket sales is needed for future investment.

It was also the same with virtual monopoly industries. BT did not innovate anything for the Internet. If left up to them we would still be waiting for a 2400 baud rate dial up modem to be approved for connection to their copper. It was other companies that pushed the technology and how we connected, especially in the early days.

Royal Mail reluctance to modernise 20/30 years ago helped with the luddite attitude by the unions has resulted in the mess it's in now and struggling to catch up with other players in the marketplace.

Neither nationalisation nor privatisation 'work' for natural monopolies..

Both lead to massive costs and poor service.

To date the best option has been a very heavily regulated private monopoly like OFCOM has done for e.g. BT.

The key to making a private water company work is to set legal limits on executive pay and dividends to be only exceeded if targets of quality and availability are met.

The problem is that the management has no incentive to produce quality in a de facto monopoly. No matter who owns it.

Natural market forces no longer work and artificial ones have to be created to provide real incentives.

Its so blindingly simple that no politician dare think it.

Is it a *smart* meter? If not, they won't be able to read it remotely.

When I had my first meter installed, I was told that it would be read remotely from a van parked in the area for a period of time. I was later upgraded to a 'smart' meter. This is Essex and Suffolk Water. The only sign of any antenna is a small lump sitting proud of the body of the meter casing.

The problem was consumers were not paying anywhere near the proper amount for using unlimited amounts of *treated, safe to drink* water, and in the case of industry, water that was not drunk anyway.

The solution was to charge the consumers much more, but then the new problem was that too much was sucked out as dividends and sent to overseas owners and not spent on what it should have been spent on.

To be fair, RM have created a commendable process of automated letter sorting and distribution, but sadly it has coincided with a massive collapse in domestic letter usage as email and electronic communication has taken over. Now add on a massive unionised work force who unsurprisingly are unwilling to change.

Dinosaurs always die rather than change

The reluctance to change happened a long time before email became popular. I used to frequent a pub that was used by postal workers and they used to tell tales about how they screwed management and the system such as sending mail back through the system to be sorted multiple times. There could only be one outcome!