"Doctor Drivel" wrote in message
...

"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?
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.
I do have a sprinkler and a hose so will try and not use the sprinkler if
possible.
Is it worth putting something in the cisterns of the toilets?

Janet

The bills drop. If you want really low bills install a rainwater
harvesting and waste water reclaim system - a tank under the garden. Your
water charges drops as well as less water goes down the sewer. It is one
of the few retrofit measures that have a quickish payback. The other is
the GasSaver used on some condensing boilers - 3 to 5 years.

You can justify the costs of rainwater collection quite easily as the whole
kit is cheap using a lot of used orange juice containers.

You could use a basic septic tank (around £500) and a submersible pump
(around £50). Since you are only using collected rainwater for lavatory
flushing there's no requirement to filter it, but if you did want to use it
for washing etc. then you should
be able to find a fairly simple filter system for under £100. Installation
adds on a bit. The downpipes from the roof have to feed into the tank which
overflows into the sewer.

The off-the-shelf 'de-luxe' packages starting at a couple of grand would
have a longer payback period.

Water charges are reduced as less rainwater is going down the sewers. Your
water charges are joint water and sewer. The water eventually goes down it.
Using rainwater to flush toilets (which is 40%, or more, of total water use)
reduces sewer use.

The water bills should drop by 2/3 using rainwater collection.