The price of metered water!!

Sewage charges are much higher in the SW because they had a very very high percentage of discharge into the sea and the local water company had to invest zillions in building local sewages works when that was banned.

Other water areas already had majority of waste water processed via inland sewage farms so didn't have this expense. The provision of these sewage farms was very likely subsidised across the whole country when the system was publically run, so residents of the SW got a bum deal here.

Though this cost is also reflected in non-metered charges with them being

I wouldn't say many times

it's about 4 times mine (so twice what 2 of me might use), not an unreasonable increase if you have a garden in a sunny location

For decades swimmers and tourists all along the south coast got a "bum deal" as they encountered turds bobbing along in front of them. There used to be an action group called SAS, Surfers against Sewage, who were compaigning to improve beach and near-beach water quality.

Why should that affect water usage unless they are using lots of water on their garden ?. If they are then they should investigate the possibility of have a separate meter on their garden tap or whether SWW can allow a reduced sewage percentage return rate for people who water their gardens a lot.

I wasn't saying that at sea discharge was right

I was saying that the SW got a bad deal on rectifying this at privatisation

that was the implied assumption.

is that even possible?

What are you going to store it in? ISTM that it would need to be used fairly soon after generation, otherwise it will start growing stuff.

Also, the volumes required will be large. Ater spending a coupla-hundred quid, we have barrels that can hold 1000 litres of rainwater. That's a measly one cu. mtr.

tim... pretended :

Southern Water assume a 92.5% return rate to foul sewer but you can ask them to change it if you use a lot of water for something that does not affect what goes back down the foul sewer.

This is a nice bit of pie in the sky. Do some sums and realise that the amount of actual gray water and more particularly rainfall you can actually store is not large.

You don't normally need to store much around Manchester, it rains often enough to keep topping it up ;)

Indeed. But the water still gets back there to be cleaned. No-one either destroys or keeps it.

Its perfectly possible to 'destroy' water by chemical reaction

but people do it

and you create gray water every day, even if it doesn't rain every day

Belgians seem to manage it with underground storage tanks for run off rainwater from all new build properties and have done since the 80's.

Even my greenhouse when I lived there had a 8m^3 sump for run off rainwater storage. I don't know how big the house one was (buried). Only if it overflowed did it dump stuff in to the local drains.

Main problem with using it for irrigation was filtering out the mosquito larvae to stop them from jamming the drip watering system and evading the mosquitoes in the greenhouse.

But eventually it ends up as water again somewhere down the line.