I've just had a water meter installed. Hopefully it will save on the normal bill of about 580 pounds a year. What sort of things can I do to cut costs as much as possible? I have four rain barrels, although I'm a bit worried about the need to top up the a small pond we have, in the summer. I do have a sprinkler and a hose so will try and not use the sprinkler if possible. Is it worth putting something in the cisterns of the toilets?
Janet
I had a water meter installed a few years ago. At first you are tempted do things like not flushing the loo every time you have a wee, using a car wash rather than your hose and brush (!) , topping up the pond only when it's virtually dry, measuring the quantity of water you put in the kettle and so on, but just sit back and relax; unless you have loads of kids who leave taps turned on, your bills should seriously reduce. I currently pay around 180 pounds a year for water supply and disposal.
I still use a sprinkler on both front and back lawns, although hydration hasn't been _too_ much of a problem for a year or two!
don't worry about it too much, unless you take 2 hour showers every morning that is, just live as normal and keep an eye on the meter readings to see how you do.
Get a few more rain barrels, make sure all the down pipes feed them, i.e. put one or 2 on the garage downpipe, one round the front of the house if allowed etc.
Top the pond up with water from the barrels, but dont fret if you have to add some from the tap, as long as your not doing it every day it wont matter much.
fit the hose pipe to the rain butts, add a pump if needed and sprinkle the lawn like that, wash the car from them too, hell if you wanted bath in them,
actually if you have a large lawn that needs a good sprinkeling, see about diverting the bath/shower water into a few barrels, grass dont care about a few skin flakes and a bit of head and shoulders in the middle of summer (assuming we get one this year, we've over due one)
pee in the cisterns, use that to flush turds??
i always found that if you faff about reducing the water in a cistern, you just end up flushing the damn thing twice to make it work properly, if you have a 1970's 2 gallon flush bog, then maybe get a modern one that uses half the water to flush, but it's the pan that makes the differance, fitting a smaller cistern to an old pan results in a poor flushing action, because the outlet holes and the rim is designed for a certian force of water to work,
wish we had the direct flush bogs like you used to get in germany, you only need to push the 'nose' for long enough to flush the contents away, bit like the toilet in my motorhome, i hold the flush switch in for as long as it takes to clear the bowl, waste tank holds 17 litres in total, and it takes a week to fill with 2 people using it (we never use campsite bogs)
They increase costs for the average user
yes.
Tap aerators too.
In Japan basins that empty straight into the big cistern are common.
NT
Why would you want an aerator?
Oh dear.
Look. Wash, don't bath. Or shower.
Piss in the garden
sell the dishwasher. Sell the washing machine.
Once you have to wash by hand, you will naturally find ways to just rinse the coffee cups, and discover that washing clothes isn't something you need to do EVERY day.
same spread for hand washing with less water use
NT
In message , Janet Tweedy writes
We had a water meter fitted when we lived in Leeds, it certainly saved us money over paying the standard bill, even without any special effort to cut down water use.
first, I'd say, not too worry too much. We have a decent sized garden and grow fruit and veg, we have a greenhouse and a pond Our consumption doesn't seem to vary much between summer and winter, which tells me that most consumption is related to the household needs. Even things like forgetting to turn the hose pipe off and it running all night..... And we live in one of the drier areas of the country
You can always use a barrel to fill it as well. what I do is run a hose from a barrel into the pond when it rains and leave the barrel tap open. Occasionally we have to use the tap, but not too often, so I don't really worry about the cost that much (topping up a 10 sq m pond 6 inches is about 1.5 cubic metres , which would cost us about GBP 3 -
3.50). you can always get more barrels, they can be located away from the down pipes and connected to other barrels via a fixed pip or syphon arrangement. Though it takes a little while to get the money back in water saved.Sprinklers can be costly in water use if you use them a lot. Lawns don't need watering, they will go brown in longer periods of dry weather but recover quickly once it rains. it's wasteful to water beds with a sprinkler as you get a lot of evaporative loses, and water where you don't need it. watering by hand, or using an irrigation system makes better use of the water.
If you have an old cistern yes it can be, with a more modern lower consumption cistern no. But check how it affects the performance of the flush. Our water co. will supply a free Hippo bag type thing.
If you have lots of baths, then having a shower instead uses a fair amount less, obviously things like not leaving taps running and fixing leaking taps all add together to make a bit of a difference.
after a couple of dry warm days. I've been gardening for decades, and have a garden, allotment and some hand in a community garden. Garden at home hasn't needed or had a hose/ sprinkler used on it in 26 years; only young seedling get sprayed with a watering can, as do things in tubs if they seem to be drying out. Allotment needs hose maybe 4 or 5 times a season if there has been hot sun and no rain for a couple of weeks; otherwise seed beds/seedlings are done with watering can. Community garden has no accessible water source and even in a three month spring/summer drought several years back there was little damage to grass or plants.
In short, plants are great survivors - water only if really necessary in long dry periods, not as a matter of course. Water young seedlings and individual plants that need it with a watering can.
Toom
My advice: don't use a hosepipe on the garden unless you are holding it.
Robert
Very true: I had a 1950s pan, designed for a high-level, 2-gallon flush and had a low-level flush on it. About twice a week it would need 3 - 5 flushes (no, I'm not boasting!) as the flushing rate and pattern didn't suit the pan. I fitted a Vitra with l-l flush and it's never been blocked in 2 years and also cut ~100li/week from the useage.
I went to a meter about 10 years ago - the bill, at the time, went from £20pcm to £5pcm and, until the prices started to go up, I was in credit.
With the correct shower head for the use, I'm running the shower at 4.75kW even with the low incoming temperature; in the 'Summer' it'll be on 3.75kW
- if I'm fast I can have the shower on for ~3.5 min.
I wash up by hand every 3 - 4 days. As I need to rinse clothes quite well, I've found that a load of laundry that uses 50li in the machine uses more than that by hand - and takes far longer to do.
If you get an underground leak and don't spot it you can end up with a bill for thousands
The bills drop. If you want really low bills install a rainwater harvesting and waste water reclaim system - a tank under the garden. Your water charges drops as well as less water goes down the sewer. It is one of the few retrofit measures that have a quickish payback. The other is the GasSaver used on some condensing boilers - 3 to 5 years.
Some household insurance will cover you for this, but by no means all.
I had a ballvalve break in the toilet cistern overnight, resulting in filling at full bore speed (and amazingly the overflow coped, just). I don't know how long it was running for (8 hours max), but that trebled my water usage that 6 month period. Water company provides a graph of usage over past 3 years on the bills, and there was a large spike.
You can justify the costs of rainwater collection quite easily as the whole kit is cheap using a lot of used orange juice containers.
You could use a basic septic tank (around £500) and a submersible pump (around £50). Since you are only using collected rainwater for lavatory flushing there's no requirement to filter it, but if you did want to use it for washing etc. then you should be able to find a fairly simple filter system for under £100. Installation adds on a bit. The downpipes from the roof have to feed into the tank which overflows into the sewer.
The off-the-shelf 'de-luxe' packages starting at a couple of grand would have a longer payback period.
Water charges are reduced as less rainwater is going down the sewers. Your water charges are joint water and sewer. The water eventually goes down it. Using rainwater to flush toilets (which is 40%, or more, of total water use) reduces sewer use.
The water bills should drop by 2/3 using rainwater collection.
Makes my day :)
NT
Thus spake Janet Tweedy ( snipped-for-privacy@lancedal.demon.co.uk) unto the assembled multitudes:
Since having a meter installed, my water costs have halved. Even so, I do still find myself thinking about how much water I use, which is often enough to prevent waste.
It's better to have the meter inside your premises to avoid that. If it's fitted with an outreader the meter man doesn't need access inside to do his bit. Mine's fitted next to the internal stoptap.
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.