“I reckon that you would half your current charges” he said if you switch to metered water. “Sounds good to me, but what if I change my mind? He told me that I could revert back after the first 12 months if I wanted to with no charge, so I went ahead with it. The only down side that I could see was that each Spring I would use a lot of water to pressure wash all my drive and paved areas plus the large patio area in the garden, I also use the power washer to clean down all the fascias, windows, walls and gutters so I probably spend a couple of days on this particular job. I did a quick calculation and reckoned that I could get through about 4,000 litres of water per day whilst using a pressure washer, this he told me would cost about £2.50 per cubic metre or per 1,000 litres. So my Spring cleanup would probably cost me around £20.00 in extra charges for the two days which as a one off seemed quite reasonable.
To date I have been pleasantly surprised as my monthly standing order for my ‘Water Rates’ which for the benefit of our none UK readers also pays for the removal and treatment of waste water from such things as Kitchen, Bathroom, Toilet and surface drain water as well as the actual domestic water supply into your home has in my case fallen by 75%. As you can see that is a huge saving over just paying the blanket standard charge that is applied to all none metered properties in the UK. To be fair though, I am assuming that because I may be somewhat in credit as payments will have been made previously based upon the higher charges and that may be being used to give a lower monthly charge than would be normal, I also need to add on something for my Spring cleaning over use of water, but all in all I cannot see that I will be paying more than 50% of my previous charges even if I take all this into account so it will be interesting to see how it all works out.
This brings me to the reason I made this post, because I would now pay for any water I use on a metered basis it would make good sense to save on water charges where possible and as I like to swill down the areas where 'Little Annie' has done her tiddles each day, then any saving on this particular water use would help. To that end I retrieved a perfectly good plastic water butt and stand from down the garden where it had lain unused for many years. I moved it up onto my patio near the end wall of my conservatory and it looked the business and was within 500mm of the down spout drain from the conservatory roof. I had to buy a new tap as the other was broken, so I popped into my local B&Q to get one. While I was in there I saw a neat little device that fitted into the down spout and fed rain water into the water butt, the clever thing was that it automatically cut off when the barrel was full and allowed the rain water to continue on down the drain, so no overflow is required for the rain butt itself. I fitted all this up yesterday afternoon and this morning I had a look in the barrel and much to my surprised it was already a quarter full after the rain we had during the night, so it just goes to show how much of our annual rainfall actually goes to waste. I am considering buying a new pressure washer and you can now get them that will use water from a water butt as well as the mains, so on that basis I may be tempted to install another butt alongside of the one I already have.
some saving don't you think? 
