Egypt4u

Due to recent changes in my circumstances I was persuaded by several people to have a water meter fitted as being on my own now I use considerably less water than the average couple or a family. I have to say that it is something I had previously resisted, but decided that I had little to lose by finding out a bit more about it so a few months ago I phoned my local water company and spoke to a very helpful person. I explained that I was not in the least interested in skimping with my water use but would like his opinion, he proceeded to ask me a few basic questions “do you prefer to bath or use a shower?” “I always shower each morning” I replied. “How many times a week do you use a washing machine?” “I would reckon about 3 times in a two week period” was my best guess. “Do you use a dishwasher?” was his last question, “no it is not worth it for the amount of dirty dishes that I create, I maybe wash up twice a day”

“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.

Love your projects, Horus . . turning into quite a survivalist ! ! . Do you ever look at the genius people and their inventions on the survival sites ? I do, even tho so much of it is quite beyond me ..

I have probably mentioned in the past Horus that I am a bit of a number cruncher when it comes to home services; water, gas and electricity. I have hand written paper spreadsheets of all the domestic ins and outs from 1969. Then in June 2000 I created a very detailed computer spreadsheet in which, apart from all the home accounts etc, also calculates my running costs for services when I input the meter readings each month.

I suppose I am a bit of a GEEK but I have always loved playing with numbers and the computer spreadsheet opens up even more clever stuff than doing it all longhand.

I too have a rainwater diverter to my water butt. In fact they were items that we used to mould for Marley when I was working. A delightfully simple but clever device that works on the principle that water always runs down the inside face of a drainpipe, never down the centre.

We had water meters installed about 20 years ago and it was generally agreed that it was cheaper than the old system where water and water service was charged according to the 'rateable value' of the property. Lat year we used 82 cubic metres but I did not do the annual pressure washing which would have added to that.

The dishwasher is used about 3 times a week and the washing machine about the same. They are both A+ rated so should be economical with water. I could go on for ages about all my efforts to conserve energy and keep the bills down but won't bore you with that. Suffice to say I have not yet had solar panels on the roof

Can't say that I do Jay, but one thing I do know is that I could survive if I had to, I reckon that comes from personal experience and being fairly handy and never having paid for a job around home in my life apart from some plastering which I am utterly useless at doing, everything else and I will turn my hand to it one way or another.

Yes Grandad they are an amazingly simple idea that just cannot fail to work (provided it is installed level with the inlet fitting on the rain butt) and of course with the benefit of having no moving parts to wear out. We must have the same love of Spreadsheets, I used to make them up for all sorts of things, one of my favourites was one that I did to calculate constantly changing steel prices. All you needed to do was to enter the current or best rate per tonne into one cell and it gave you the cost for any size and thickness of sheet and steel plates together with every available size and length of all rolled steel sections and pipes. Once the new figure was entered numerous pages of all the available items would all change automatically, it was quite satisfying to see it working and a great time saver to boot.

Exactly Change one cell and all related cells update instantly. I even project my household spreadsheet forward 5 years so I can see how well off (OR NOT) I might be in 5 years time (With a lot of assumptions of course ) Quite useful for planning holidays etc...

As this is 'boys stuff' I will pop off and come back with something relevant to the spreadsheet thing.......

Got back while the Edit was still available. Here are two of the graphs that generate from my spreadsheet, Electricity and Gas usage from June 2001. I use them to monitor the effect of changes like adding insulation to the house, new boiler, thermostatic rad valves, long life bulbs etc..

The new boiler DID show an improvement but the usage climbed again during last winters long cold spell. Ironically my electricity usage has INCREASED since the new boiler was installed. Probably because this one has a motor, but they don't include that in all the sales blurb




Thought these might interest you as we both have very similar backgrounds

Wow Grandad that is what I call a bit of forward planning

Just a bit of fun to keep me amused H and as you know, once your spreadsheet is set up you just have to add new data and it does the rest for you. Simples

WOW - am impressed with both of you guys!!!

I have to say that here in the good old "Rainforest" area of Canada I'm not too concerned about conserving water although we do have to pay a standard rate for water which is charged to our yearly property taxes. If we go over what is considered 'normal' usage we'd be charged more however to go over whatever each household allotment is you'd have to leave 2 taps on full blast 24/7 all the time.

That being said June/July/August/September we are only able to 'water' (water grass, water the yard) every other day. Annual conservation as although we get mega mega rain we do not do anything at all to have excess water in the summer. We basically go from feast to famine with our water and every once in a while if we get a dry summer we can get into some serious difficulties with not having sufficient water.

Am also impressed with your spread sheets Grandad. I don't have spreadsheets but that is cause our Hydro company does it for us and I can tell you to the hour how much electricity aka Hydro here I use. I'm kinda miserly with my hydro (which is also my heat) too. I hate wasting hydro, water and pretty much anything.

Way back when when there wasn't much here I lived a rather austere lifestyle. As the house had no running water it was hand pumped, heated on a stove and doled out sparingly. Same with firewood. It was a whole week of cutting, slicing, chopping, stacking and then carrying it all armload by armload into the house (but I do love the heat of a fire).

Used to have enough food canned to live for years. Am not quite that bad now although I do have lots of my canning jars filled with dried beans, rice, lentils, seeds etc.

A lot to be said for the old days and old ways LLL. As a child of the thirties I am sure that my resistence to minor ailments is much stronger than the young people of today (I'm touching wood ).

We rarely had any restrictions on water usage and the amount you paid which was based upon a sort of property value put you into a particular band and each band has a set cost which you pay. The unfairness of this system has always been that a large family could use any amount of water with baths, washing clothes etc and generally splash it everywhere and they only paid the same as a single person using very little water. This same unequal principle also applies to the 'General Rates' that are collected to pay for services like waste collection, road sweeping, schools, libraries, parks and just about every other public service available. At one time the famous politician Margaret Thatcher tried to even this imbalance by implementing a 'poll tax' in which each member of a household had to pay a designated amount, this caused riots within the UK and the eventual downfall of her government.

Although we used to have plenty of water in the UK, we also lose at least 25% through a poor infrastructure and leaks in the system. Add to this the huge increase in our population due to unregulated immigration and we now find ourselves running short at times especially during long hot spells (if we ever get any ) and at such times they will impose a 'hose pipe ban' to conserve supplies. To be honest this is a ridiculous situation for a country with so much rainfall and it all could be avoided with more or larger reservoirs and better maintenance of our infrastructure, but since these companies were privatised the profits get diverted to shareholders instead of reinvested.

Most of these regional water companies are very keen to get everyone onto a water meter and eventually every home in the UK will have one fitted. Currently this is a voluntary thing, but all new builds have to have them installed and it is now common for the buyer of an older property to find that as the new owner or tenant they also have to have a water meter fitted when they take up residence. Obviously this is a fairer system as a family with several members would pay more than the single person, however this is only fair provided that the water is sold at a reasonable cost in the first place. Unfortunately as with other necessities such as gas, electricity & petrol they are often hiked up out of all proportion to their production costs and can become a huge burden on the average family budget.

Here whether we use it or not there is a set minimum each house must day for electricity and water. If you go over then you pay more.

With electricity (known as hydro here) there is a minimum you must pay whether you use it or not. Then a first tier rate which if you're reasonably responsible you can go the entire month on first tier. IF you go over the first tier rate then you pay a higher charge for using the same amount of electricity per day and this second tier is considerable.

We get a ridiculous amount of rainfall too - BUT - nowhere do we have any facilities to keep some of it for hot dry times. IF we get long hot dry summers and sometimes we do we run perilously close to not having any fresh water. A rather ridiculous system for a country that for most of the year treads water. Climate is changing and I can actually see a time when a prolonged drought could put us into serious problems.

Just for information, my new rain butt was completely full by this morning, so just two days of average rainfall has filled an empty rain butt, it just goes to show how much water is available and how much of it is allowed to go to waste. If you think of how much water is used to flush a toilet (in the UK that is 4 gallons) then it does not take a genius to realise that a big chunk of your water usage could be obtained for nothing if that rain butt water was pumped into a dedicated header tank for toilet flushing only.

I see another project comming on.

Horus wrote: it does not take a genius to realise that a big chunk of your water usage could be obtained for nothing if that rain butt water was pumped into a dedicated header tank for toilet flushing only.

Horus there is already a system available, possibly being incorporated in newbuilds, where rain water is stored at a high level and used for toilet flushing. If that sump empties then the system automatically switches to the mains until rain puts water in the sump again.
If it was practical in my home I would do it because I would estimate that around 75% of water usage goes straight down the loo.
My current water and water service costs are £28.80 a month (total) I still think our good clean water is cheap but by my estimation I might save up to around £250 a year, a useful saving...

Good to see that someone is using common sense and using the rain water to flush the loo.

Grandad, as a comparrison my monthly charge used to be £57.12
Now it is £13.30 some saving don't you think?

Is that for water and waste water service H? That is a real saving. I gain a little because all my surface water goes to soakaway. If it went down the drain I would pay more.

What I totally hate here are the hot water tanks. Mine is 60 gallons that always has to stay HOT. WHY we can't install inline water heaters is beyond me.

@ Grandad - what is soakaway?

LLL, a soakaway is an underground pit usually filled with gravel into which the rainwater from the roof and driveways drain. It then soaks away into the earth. If we don't have a soakaway we are charged for an estimated amount of drain off that would go through the sewer system.

LLL, you could have a combi boiler that does not have a hot water storage tank and heats water 'on demand'.

Yes that covers everything Grandad, water usage and all waste and surface water disposal.

LLL, as Grandad has pointed out, it is far more economical to install a ‘Combi’ boiler as these do not need a storage system as the hot water supply is almost instant therefore you only heat what you actually use. I replaced my old boiler system some years ago and this allowed me to remove all the storage tanks from the loft area as they are no longer required with this type of boiler, although as I mentioned in another post my present boiler has probably reached the end of it’s economical life and I can see me replacing it fairly soon. The very latest type of Combi boilers are the ‘Condensing’ type that are more efficient and are now the only type you are allowed by law to install in the UK, these boilers have an efficiency rating at over 90% and comply with our current rules for energy conservation which says that every appliance from fridge’s to washing machines receive a alphabetical rating with ‘A’ being the best.

This latest type recover most of the waste heat from the boiler flue and produce a small amount of condensate as a result and it is this that I find to be the major problem with them. I have lost count of the number of people I know that have had this condensate outlet freeze up in freezing weather resulting in the boiler refusing to operate. The main problem is that the water produced is just a small trickle and therefore is more easily frozen, similar to an icicle slowly being formed. This problem can be overcome though by having the discharge pipe as short as possible on the outside, or better still being discharged into an internal pipe such as a washing machine outlet as this seems to cure the problem.

I've never heard of a 'combi boiler' and when I put it into Google here this is what I got returned:

"Your search for "combi boilers prices" did not return any products. However, below are matches found using some of your search terms combi boilers"..........with photos like this:


which I'm not sure are water heaters. Mostly the photos were of ovens with broilers attached.

The combi boiler idea sounds terrific. Sure beats the heck out of keeping 40 to 60 gallons of water heated!

Your find was not the same LLL, here is a link to some images, but not sure if it will work for where you are.
http://uk.images.search.yahoo.com/searc ... mbi+boiler

Notice how small and compact they are and they will easily replace a single wall mounted kitchen unit. They will run a full central heating system of hot water radiators and supply all your requirements for domestic hot water on an instant demand basis.