My water bill is so high!! any help?

[MrsJLS85]

I just got a letter through from my water supplier, and they are raising my monthly direct debit from £60 to £95/month!! Is it just me or is that ridiculously high?
It is just 2 adults and one child in the house, and we live in a 3 bed, 3 bath, semi. Its a new build with all new appliances, so I assume everything is energy efficient as they come. DH and I take daily showers, and DC takes a bath every second day. I run the dish washer every second day, and do maybe 2-3 loads of laundry every week. To me this sounds normal, but maybe its not? Does anyone have any suggestions of how I can reduce this??

[Yellowbutterfly1]

Thames water and I’m paying £30. Month on a meter.
It really seems to have gone up a lot over the last couple of years and according to my bills the amount of water we use for 4 of us makes us look like really dirty so and so’s. (Promise we aren’t)

[Mrcrumpswife]

Yes, no flushing, just the leak draining into the pan from the cistern. It wouldnt change colour without flushing in a normal working loo.

[zumbaholic]

mrcrumpswife- how does that work? i thought if you put something in the citern-eg those blue looblock things then it automatically disperses into the toilet or do you mean without actaully flushing? confused!

[zumbaholic]

Hmm sounds v v high. Im unmetered in south west and pay £42 a month, although judging by the interactive thing i just did on wessex water website i use about a 1/4 of average users so im v tempted to go on a meter...

[ToeCap]

I am on a meter and pay £75.30 per month direct deb.

[Bakingnovice]

My neighbours are on a low fixed tariff as they are tax credits. They say it's a very good deal. We aren't eligible but other might be?

Water costs are so high at the moment. We pay £52 month.

[Mrcrumpswife]

Anyone with an exceptionally high bill should check for silent leaks in the toilet. On Xmas eve we received our 6 monthly bill which was just under a 1000.00. I nearly had a panic attack. It turns out our toilet cistern was constantly filling 24 hours a day and instead of the loo leaking out, it drained straight into the pan and out of the natural over flow without us noticing anything We were loosing the equivalent of 324, 2 litre bottles of coke every 24 hours.

All we had to do was put food colouring in the cistern and wait 10 mins to see if it filled the pan with coloured water which it did within mins.

We are now filling in forms to try and get a leakage allowance on our bill so fingers crossed or i will be paying a 200.00 a month direct debit which is not going to happen unless we starve.

[Sabriel]

We've just had our water bill. For the period July to Jan we've used 30 cubic metres. Water supply is £55.11 and sewerage is £70.92.

3 adults and 1 child. Washing machine does 5-6 loads a week and we wash-up by hand.

[specialsubject]

indeed. Why don't you fix the drips?

[midastouch]

We have a 2 bed terraced house for 2 adults 2 children. Ours is currently £800 a year on a meter. im told by water company more than double what we should be using! Oh blames me with my ocd, but actuallly the dripping taps and shower that he hasnt fixed are using a lot more water than you'd think. I put a large bucket under the shower the other night it had overflowed by the time we got up!! Proved my point!

[katspaw]

Single-ish, on a water meter, consume circa 60 cubic metres per year (which is about the going rate for my circumstances).

In my area, the water bill is made up of four separate elements:

Fixed and volume related water
Fixed and volume related sewage

Which works out at £27/month

If the government had any balls, everyone would be on a water meter.

[breatheslowly]

The size of your house shouldn't make any difference to the amount of water you use unless you have a mansion with a massive garden that you water.

We pay about £68 per month for 2 adults + child, but I love long showers and DH takes ages in the shower and often has 2 per day due to sport. We also do about 1 load of washing a day. We have a dishwasher which should use less water than washing up by hand.

If you have moved house then there is a risk that the people leaving misread a digit on the water meter before they left - did you read it when you moved in?

[Fluffycloudland77]

It depends if you are able of changing behaviour eg pil have one and use loads of water, no dishwasher, washing machine always set to quickwash, long showers.

So there bill stayed roughly the same if not more.

However, I use all the Eco cycles, have a dishwasher and have tap inserts and a shower insert so our bill on a meter was £13 a month.

[PlaySchool]

Golly! I am paying £80 per month on water rates. There are 4 of us in the house so we use a lot of water but from reading these posts, I may be better off with a meter.

[Blondeshavemorefun]

£50 a month for in and out

Would like a meter but when they water board came round they couldn't find where my water supply comes from

Must contact them again

[Spalva]

Thank you! We talked to Essex & Suffolk and they said right away, before we even said anything, that it was way too much. But then the water man came and he acted like it was no big deal and just told me to take showers! I told him it was 5 time more consumtpion than we had previously had and that our habits hadn't changed but he just shrugged and kept saying to take showers.

[specialsubject]

a ton of water is 1000 litres, which is a cubic metre, which is the unit that the water companies use. E and S charge £1.32 for that, and then another 64p for the sewage, so let's say £2 a unit.

That bill sounds ridiculous. Do your own test for a couple of hours - not a few minutes. It really sounds like there is a leak.

a power shower uses lots of water - depending on the power and the length of time, it can use more than a bath. As your girls are having both at once, that will use lots of water. Also handwashing lots of dishes uses more water and power than a dishwasher.

However I still don't believe you are using that much.

[Spalva]

Hi,

We also just received a massive water from Essex & Suffolk. We moved to the UK in August and our bill was £352! The usage on the bill is five times higher than what we were using in Lithuania. Not the price, the usage. So the water man came out and went down to the meter and had me turn the water off and on. He said it didn't budge while I had the water off, so no leak. He said the meter was read two days after we moved in. He gave me the figure of the last reading and told me we'd already used a ton of water since then -- I should have written it all down but that basically we had already used 100 liters since then (a short period of time, again I should have written it all down, dh's not going to be happy that I didn't). Anyway, he finished off by saying we should all be taking showers.

We are two adults and two children in a two-bed flat. We all shower/bathe once every two days. The girls like their baths but they keep them fairly shallow and then they fill up when I wash their hair. I do tend to keep the shower going during this process because every time I switch on/off the water takes several seconds to heat up and goes from scalding to freezing then normal, so it's a royal pain to keep switching it off to lather up their hair and rinse it. We did switch to a whole shampoo/conditioning thing that I wasn't doing with them before so it does take a bit more water for rinsing. Still, I can't understand how our usage would be that much more here than there!
I probably do 5 washings/week. I cook a lot so do a lot of dishes.

Any insight?

[specialsubject]

My Thames Water meter bill was £20 a month - and they charge £1.15 a unit which is pretty high. For about the same usage as the OP - so yes, there is a leak or a problem.

unless you are taking massive 20 minute showers of course. :-)

[Bakingnovice]

We are on a meter. It's depressing.

[3plus2]

Woweie! I thought I was having money problems , we pay £30 pm 4 bed 1bath downstairs loo dishwasher on daily as is the washing machine usually and 3 kids , we have baths no shower in the house so 3 bath tubs daily.

[gettingeasier]

Get a meter

£23 per month 3 bed semi with 2 long shower loving teens !!

[Bakingnovice]

Mrs jls did you find out if there was a leak?

[MrsJLS85]

Thanks everyone for the advice!! Will definitely do all of your suggestions, and look into this right away.