With the ongoing drought in mind, and part of a long term trend that will deteriorate further over future years, we have been considering how to further manage our water consumption. Yorksire Water, our geographic water supplier, have sent round small information booklets highlighting some of the more obvious measures: https://www.yorkshirewater.com/bill-account/water-usage/
The only thing we haven’t yet done is implement a water butt for the garden, so that is next up for us. We don’t have a lawn, and our main bed is only just getting established, but we have a plan for the watering of it. We have a combi boiler. Although the heating is off, and will stay off for as long as we can manage, it fires up for our hot water. It takes a minute or so for the upstairs showers to warm up. So, we now have buckets in the showers to catch the water as it warms. This is then re-used to wash in our sinks, wash things in the kitchen, wipe the car windows, and possibly a watering can or two in the garden from time to time. We also have timers in the shower to keep our shower time down to a minimum.
How far will this help? We weren’t minded to change from a billing point of view, but more to accept that although we are yet to achieve peak Arrakis, we are on that journey. Perhaps these efforts will not help that much, but if we were all super conscious of our consumption, then I can’t help think that it would make an appreciable difference.
As part of my considerations I went onto my Yorkshire Water customer portal, to check what our consumption was and consider how I could track it over time. To my surprise there was very little information on my water consumption. The portal seemed to be there to support billing only. My energy provider has reasonable information on consumption for me to track.
So, I reached out to Yorkshire Water via the only written avenue possible (unless you wanted to send them a letter…), via Twitter. See the dialogue to the right. Yes, we do have a water meter, just as I have electricity and gas meters. The water meter is accessible, but awkwardly so. It seems to me that making this information easily available for customers, by exposing the data that they already collect, should be an easy thing to do and warrants their immediate attention. I have nothing to compare them with. It might be that this information simply isn’t made available by the water suppliers, but I would be surprised if that was so.
We’ll continue to be cautious with our water usage. I will give it six months and see if water consumption is added to the Yorkshire Water customer portal. I think this is the sort of thing retired middle class people are supposed to do?