Water Bills
Got through a water bill the other day. This is not a particularly earth shattering event given people get bills all the time, but I was interested to see what difference our water saving measures had made to our bill. As we have a water meter, it was easy to find out.
Looking at the bill for the previous year for the period of 1 April to 4 October 2005, we used 36m3 of water. So that’s 187 days, which works out at 0.19m3 of water per day. Total bill £80.94, or 43p a day.
This year? Well between 5 April and 27 September we apparently used 20m3 of water. By my reckoning, that’s 176 days which means 0.114m3 of water a day., The bill, a total of £59.86. So that’s 34p a day.
In that are a couple of factors - the actual cost per m3 has gone up as has the fixed charges Thames Water impose. So if we’d used 36m3 this year, our bill would have come out as £82.67.
Now not all the water savings come from our initial plans - both Catherine and myself use the gym showers once a week when we’ve been swimming, although if we’ve been to work out in the gym itself, we tend to shower at home. However all in all, I think there’s a result. The idea of saving water has been achieved.
As way of real contrast, I found a bill for our flat in Ealing for 2001. That flat had no meter installed, and we were on water rates. Now this was a one bedroom flat, yet for six months of the year, Thames Water assumed we’d use a whopping 120m3 of water. That’s six times the amount we actually used in the same period this year. And that was in a flat with no garden… For six months, our bill worked out as £94.07 - a whopping 51p a day. Goodness knows what they thought people do with the water from their taps…
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