And /energy/. A /lot/ of energy.
There are already movements of raw water between regions. More are planned in companies' strategic plans. But when you've used up the easy options ("downhill all the way!") it involves pumping. That's energy intensive 'cos water is heavy. It's also not worth a lot per per tonne. So it's hard to get the sums to add up unless the price goes up a lot or (as with so many engineering problems) energy becomes cheaper.
I read our meter once a month, as a check.
No, two different companies. One of them now handles all the billing, but that's fairly recent.
Mine is out in the road, down a hole with the lid slightly recessed. Opening it up involves cleaning away the mud to get access to the lid, bailing the water out of the hole, if it's been raining, removing a truly disgusting foam rubber plug that appears to serve no purpose, and trying to clean the muck off the glass on the meter, all the while hoping that a car doesn't come whizzing along to smack into me. It's not something I do often!
Isostatic rebound after the last ice age will mean that gravity will assist in the future for moving water from where it rains most to the dryer SE of England.
When I requested a meter I had a communication saying that one would be fitted within a specified timescale and I didn't need to be present. I went to work and on arriving back home I noticed a small amount of earth on the path to my front door. A meter had been fitted in the pipe between the pavement and my house in a space around 3ft x 2ft bounded by a brick wall, a privet hedge and my path. The meter is down a 3 foot hole.
Interesting, we have two 2 bedroom holiday lets. One is more popular and un-metered and the less popular one is metered. We pay less in water charges for the un-metered one. Neither has use of a hose. My father appled for a meter in his last year when he was just living with a carer and it was cheaper not to be on the meter as admitted by the water company.
So I for one am not convinced.
Jonathan
Depends on house rateable value and number of people living in it. If 2 of you live in a 5 bed detached then get a meter. If 30 of you live in a 2 up 2 down terraced property then remain unmetered.
It happens that Chris Hogg formulated :
Could you not fit a meter of your own, indoors? It would not agree perfectly with the official one, but it wouldn't be far out and would give an indication of a problem.
It could also depend on where you live. Water prices per cubic metre (plus standing charges) may be comparable across the country but sewage charges based on water consumption could be quite a bit different.
In SE Essex I pay:
132p per cubic metre + £39 fixed charge for water 90p per cubic metre + £64 fixed charge for sewageChecking Welsh water
138p per cubic metre + F39 fixed charge for water 163p per cubic metre + £92 fixed charge for sewage 144p + £68 for sewage if surface (rain) water is not put down the drains.On average each of us uses 55 cubic metres of water per year but it does depend on lifestyle. Frequent baths and watering gardens push up this figure.
All depends on your rateable value - high RV - switch, in the middle "it depends", low RV - stay where you are. In the middle, it depends,
In 2006 my unmetered bill in Sussex was £475. (2 bed 1970s flat) Meter installed in April 2006, and the annual bill went down to about £150.
By contrast when I moved to the Midlands (2 bed late Victorian terrace) two years later, the annual unmetered water bill was under £150. There's no way on gods earth that I would save money with a water meter. (Current annual cost is around £250/year)
I now live in my mother's bungalow, and the leak I described earlier was between the meter and the bungalow. That wouldn't be detected by a meter in the house, unless I read both meters and compared values, which would still mean reading the one in the road. If I was going to do that, I might as well just watch the needle on the meter in the road with all the taps in the bungalow turned off.
Two companies must share the information. Water and sewage cost are based on the same meter reading but I get bills from two different companies.
With a lever operated siphonic flush it's normally operate and let go for short flush and operate and hold for long. The handle must return straight away after being let go.
There is hole at the top of the lifting cylinder that lets air into the siphon when the water level drops to it. This hole is covered by the lifting disc when the handle is held for a long flush stopping air entring until the water level drops to the bottom of the lifting cylinder.
You don't have to read the street meter the water co does that and tells you. You then compare the volume consumed between it and your meter and if the street meter is radically higher something is going somewhere it shouldn't.
The hard bit might knowing when the street meter has been read if it's one of the "drive by" types so the cack around the lid won't get disturbed.
Not necessarily. For the last three bills / eighteen months they've asked me to read it and tell them the figure, or else they'll send an estimated bill. While I'm doing that, I usually check for leaks by watching the needle.
Maybe to stop the silly way they do things.
Day 1 a gang turn up, put up some barriers and some temporary traffic lights.
Days 2 to 7 - the only thing that happens is motorists get frustrated by temporary traffic lights.
Day 8 a gang turn up to dig hole
Days 9 to 14 motorists get further frustrated by temporary traffic lights.
etc. etc.
I have noticed recently that the gas main replacement scheme being undertaken locally only seems to close down streets for 3 weeks at a time instead of the previous 6+ weeks.
There is ALWAYS one or two stories about large bills due to leaks but you never seem to hear of the millions of homes where there have been no such leaks.
Undetected leaks on your own property are probably more to do with localised building work by you or a neighbour and in these circumstances a quick check afterwards is not that difficult.
removing a
Frost protection.
I had the same foam plug but also a 2 inch deep plastic cover. Having some spare gap filling foam I filled my (hollow) plastic cover with the foam and discarded the separate plug.
In message snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com, Chris Hogg snipped-for-privacy@privacy.net writes
Hmm.. recent meter change here (condensation under the glass made reading difficult). New meter has some immovable device covering the flow indicator and the units on the display:-( Is this a remote read device? If so, low flows are going to be impossible to monitor visually.
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