"Janet Tweedy" wrote in message
...
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?

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.

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.

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.

I do have a sprinkler and a hose so will try and not use the sprinkler if
possible.

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)

Is it worth putting something in the cisterns of the toilets?

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)