Hose pipe ban?

Haggisman said:
And yet if everyone on unlimited broadband downloaded 20TB a day, you can guarantee that either prices for unlimited packages would would shoot up, or no one would offer them, thus ruining it for everyone. Its called being responsible and considerate, something severely lacking in today's entitled society.

Also, without a meter, you're not paying for "unlimited" water, you're paying based on the average amount a household of your type would use, e.g. based on size, house value etc. If it were truly unlimited, then everyone without a meter would pay the same amount whether they were in a 1 bedroom flat or 8 bedroom manor house, you don't see Virgin charging more if you have a bigger house do you?
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Not to mention the throttling policies that would be implemented by ISPs.

Now imagine if your water company introduced a throttling policy during heavy demand.
 
Haggisman said:
Also, without a meter, you're not paying for "unlimited" water, you're paying based on the average amount a household of your type would use, e.g. based on size, house value etc. If it were truly unlimited, then everyone without a meter would pay the same amount whether they were in a 1 bedroom flat or 8 bedroom manor house, you don't see Virgin charging more if you have a bigger house do you?
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How is it not unlimited then. I cant find anything that says i have a fair usage agreement, or anything about only using water amounting to the amount of people in the house / number of bedrooms.
 
robj20 said:
How is it not unlimited then. I cant find anything that says i have a fair usage agreement, or anything about only using water amounting to the amount of people in the house / number of bedrooms.
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Indeed. Rateable value of the property.

For an unmetered property, the charge is based on each pound of the Rateable Value (RV) of your property, plus a fixed charge.


UNMETERED Fixed charge per year* Charge per £ of RV (rateable value)
Water supply £241.62 £0.1431
Sewerage services (including surface water drainage) £286.25 ** £0.1539
Sewerage services (without surface water drainage) £249.25 ** £0.1539
Notes: *Up to RV £1,000 ** includes a fixed charge of £31.00 to cover highway drainage.
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Most household customers who do not have a water meter receive a bill each year that is based on the rateable value of their property.

Rateable Values were an assessment of the annual rental value of a property. They were used by local authorities for the General Rates system of local tax between 1967 and 1990. Assessments were made by the District Valuer’s office of the Inland Revenue and, at the time, households were able to appeal the Rateable Value of their property. Each local authority took a number of factors into account when it set rateable values. These included the size and general condition of the property and the availability of local services. We have no specific details about how properties were assessed and cannot tell you why similar properties have a different rateable value.

In 1990 the General Rates system was replaced by the Community Charge (Poll Tax) and the District Valuer’s office was disbanded. As a result, households could no longer appeal the Rateable Value of their property. Rateable values were last updated in 1990 so any changes to your property since then will not be reflected in your rateable value. All properties built since 1990 have a water meter installed.
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MooMoo444 said:
That's not throttling that's bottlenecking. If everyone happens to use water at the same time, then it will flow slowly. Our pipes are only so big :p
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Thought that after posting... Difference being its not a supplier intent to limit supply but a 'fault' due to excess demand.

What about bandwidth shaping/traffic management on the water supply?

First X amount of water is at full speed
Next X is at half speed/slower speed

Peak times per house flow will be reduced by X%

Time of usage charge, so true 'off peak' is cheapest, usage at peak times (which are documented/well known) is most expensive.

Could be managed by a 'smart meter'.
And if you have that and logging/data with some intelligence it could monitor for leaks (ongoing/continuous low level usage/ramping up of low level continuous usage triggers a warning)
In home display showing usage by the 5 minute slot along with info about above (current cost, time and countdown till next cost change, daily usage, monthly usage, bill amount so far and estimated bill based on monthly usage so far)
Build a decent API/web front end for those who want to patch into it and do their own thing, allow data downloads.

Make it like the smart gas/electric meters without any of the ANNOYING issues that they have.

Fun floating ideas ;)
 
BinnsY said:
You seem to be under the impression that the water companies should have the infrastructure in place to be able to cope with a huge spike in demand the like of which we essentially haven't seen for 30+ years. It's just like the people that moan we can't grit all of our roads in winter because we have one exceptionally bad winter every 10 years. No company in the world can realistically organise it's infrastructure to cope for extremes like this. And if you do it would simply be wasted investment for the 99% of the time it is needed.
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Actually, that is exactly what water companies do - Each asset is built to cope with a specific frequency of event, ie 1-in-15, 1-in-30 or 1-in-50, meaning an extreme incident that you would expect to occur only once every 50 years....
The problem is when it happens more often, which we're now starting to see with current changes in weather and the difficulty in upgrading things that were not designed for 14 million people's infrastructure lumped over the top of it.

chris.tarry85 said:
Guessing from your location that you work for Thames Water?
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They're one of ours, yes, and the one I mainly am involved with.

chris.tarry85 said:
They are the absolute worst example of privatisation - compare the amount of dividends they have paid over the last decade with the amount of corporation tax and the huge pension deficit.
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Yeh, now compare their current performance to the days before privatisation, when absolutely **** all ever got done and it all got tied up in local council bureaucracy, responsibility and ownership got bounced around between all manner of different departments, records were virtually non-existent, and the whole thing was just another Old Boys Club.... You really wanna go back to those days?

Dividends are paid to the shareholders, who are mostly investment companies working on behalf of pension funds. Chances are if you're British and have a pension, it's invested in a company like Thames.
The corporation tax thing was perfectly legal, however immoral you might argue it... and the borrowing of pensions that created the deficit was partly due to the old Final Salary thing from ye olde dayes, which many similar companies struggled over, but again all perfectly within the law.

chris.tarry85 said:
The amount they are borrowing has massively increased too - where exactly has all this money gone?
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Now THAT was down to the company itself being owned by other private companies - In this case the Germans at RWE and later the Australians at MacQuarries, both of whom mortgaged the company against their own borrowing, asset-stripped it, and then flogged it off before the **** hit the fan. In short, it got nicked by the owners.

chris.tarry85 said:
Certainly not into any investment around here where it look them 10 weeks to fix a leak and where every winter sewage regularly floods the school playing field and is then pumped into the local river.
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Repair work is made complicated by the bureaucracy of other parties (local councils in particular). With no such barriers, I could have my guys out on site and fixing a sewer within 2hrs...
Flooding depends on many different factors. The most problematic right now is a combination of new builds pushing the system over capacity and too many people paving over the soakaway systems, customers flushing things they shouldn't, and unmapped private sewers not being maintained.
But believe it or not, investment in maintenance and upgrading of infrastructure is dictated entirely by the regulator - If OFWAT say they can only spend X on that, then that's all they can do.

chris.tarry85 said:
For some strange reason they have no concerns over capacity when new developments are proposed though - brown envelopes perhaps...
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Just the opposite - Thames have a massive Developer Services department, who are constantly raising cases against builders for implementing things without approval. They also have one separate department specifically for buildovers and another dedicated to mis-connections.

robj20 said:
How is it not unlimited then. I cant find anything that says i have a fair usage agreement
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Because it's not necessary - If people start overusing, the water simply runs out and you are then physically limited by the fact of the reservoir being empty.
 
so UU official stance is 5th August with the exception of Carlisle it seems

Yorkshire Water could be to follow
 
If the water companies were nationalised now, there would be a company set up owned by the Government to run the water in the same way as the East Coast mainline. It won't just be bounced around local councils to run as they see fit like the old days.

Also they are going on about the reservoirs drying up in the news, what happens to the water at the treatment works? I'm sure I had a trip to one back in school, where the water is cleaned up and pumped back out to customers again.
 
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LeeUK said:
If the water companies were privatised now, there would be a company set up owned by the Government to run the water in the same way as the East Coast mainline. It won't just be bounced around local councils to run as they see fit like the old days.

Also they are going on about the reservoirs drying up in the news, what happens to the water that the treatment works? I'm sure I had a trip to one in back in school, where the water is cleaned up and pumped back out to customers again.
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Here the treated water goes in the river.
 
I had a new lawn laid 6 weeks ago - because a family friend had some left over from landscaping his garden.

If it hadn't been for the opportunity of receiving £3k worth of turf for the cost of a takeaway, I'd not have been in the financial position to do it.

So I have to water it every night, or I'll have to replace it at the full cost, and my kids lose the ability to play in our new garden.

Until there's actually a hosepipe ban put in place, I'll continue to water it, every night, until the weather cools and we start getting regular rainfall.
 
RedMogg said:
I had a new lawn laid 6 weeks ago - because a family friend had some left over from landscaping his garden.

If it hadn't been for the opportunity of receiving £3k worth of turf for the cost of a takeaway, I'd not have been in the financial position to do it.

So I have to water it every night, or I'll have to replace it at the full cost, and my kids lose the ability to play in our new garden.

Until there's actually a hosepipe ban put in place, I'll continue to water it, every night, until the weather cools and we start getting regular rainfall.
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Nothing stopping you watering it. Just not with a hose pipe.
I plan on getting my father in law to do mine and wash the car. He has a cleaning business so can still use the house and pressure washer. Silly stopping residential but not commercial were either running out of water or were not.
 
LeeUK said:
Also they are going on about the reservoirs drying up in the news, what happens to the water that the treatment works?
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https://www.thameswater.co.uk/Help-...ook-after-your-water/Drinking-water-treatment
https://www.thameswater.co.uk/cycles/

robj20 said:
Silly stopping residential but not commercial were either running out of water or were not.
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Residentials won't lose income under a hosepipe ban and can often use more water in total than businesses do.
 
ttaskmaster said:
https://www.thameswater.co.uk/Help-...ook-after-your-water/Drinking-water-treatment
https://www.thameswater.co.uk/cycles/


Residentials won't lose income under a hosepipe ban and can often use more water in total than businesses do.
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Tough luck. Like i said somewhere else, a local car wash near me they leave the hose running constantly. Had the council today cleaning the roads with water, surely thats a waste.
Saw my neighbor watering last night and i asked him about the hose ban, he just said i wont tell if you wont. We grow a fair bit of veg as well so im not about to lose that either.
 
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