£9.80 a month, or £117.60 a year: that's what our water bill went up by in April. The letter from Yorkshire Water had said bills across the region would rise from 1 April, in line with what the regulator allows the company to charge, and then it gave us the figure. We went from £39.80 a month to £49.60, which is about a quarter more. The letter sat on the kitchen worktop for a fortnight before I properly read it.
What we were paying for
We're on an unmetered bill, which means the charge comes from the rateable value of the house and not from the amount of water that goes through it. Nobody has ever measured what two adults who are out at work three days a week do with the taps, and I hadn't thought to ask. The account was one of seven I set up in a single evening in February, and "unmetered" went through on a nod. Water is now the fourth biggest line in our budget, ahead of both phones and the broadband.
A meter works differently. You pay a standing charge plus a price for every cubic metre, which is 1,000 litres. It doesn't suit everybody, because a busy family house can pay more with a meter than without. We are two adults with no dishwasher, no hose and no children, so I wanted to see what the numbers said. Matt's first question was whether we shower more than other people. Mine was how anyone would know.
The sums for two
I used an online water calculator, which asks about showers, baths, washing machine loads, toilet flushes and the garden. Our answers were two showers a day of about six minutes each, almost no baths (the bath is peach and the shower over it does the work), three loads of washing a week and no garden watering yet. Showers were the biggest line, then the toilet, then the washing machine. A bath uses roughly 80 litres and six minutes of our shower is nearer 50, which is a figure I now know and wish I didn't.
The calculator put us somewhere between £25 and £35 a month. I took the middle and called it £30. Against £49.60 that would be a saving of about £20 a month, or roughly £235 a year. It isn't a promise. It's a guess from a form on a website, and I put it in the spreadsheet in grey italics, which is how I mark numbers I don't trust.
Asking, and the rule that made it low-risk
On Thursday evening I filled in the request on the water company's website. It asked for the address, the account number and a reason, and had a few boxes to tick. One covered the rule that made the whole thing feel safe: if the metered bills turn out higher than the unmetered ones, you can switch back within a set period. With ours that's two years from the meter going in, at the time of writing. The meter itself is free to fit. The periods differ between companies, so it's worth checking the small print on yours.
An email arrived a few minutes later with a reference number. It said the meter would most likely go in a box in the pavement outside, so nobody needs to be home. That suits us. It didn't give a date, and I haven't got one yet.
What I'd do differently is ask in February. We have paid the unmetered price since the day we got the keys, and I wish I'd treated that first evening of account-setting as a choice and not a form. A meter in the ground three months earlier would have cost nothing to try.
Until the letter arrives, I have started timing my showers, and Matt has started pretending not to notice.
