Hosepipe bans – are you sceptical or will you do your bit?

why can’t we get water from the sea look at countries that get little rain every year spain the med

I was brought up in the south east of France (Provence/Med) and the lesson to learn from there is that water is precious and not to waste it: have a shower rather than a bath, turn off the tap while you are brushing your teeth, do the washing up in a sink full of hot water and not under the running hot tap, wash the car using a bucket (sorry, Wavechange, you can’t escape this one ;0) ), and so on and so forth, we all know the drill. And this is throughout the year, never mind when there’s a ban. Water companies are wasteful enough themselves without our adding to the problem.

I forgot to say that I stay in Edinburgh, where there is no ban. We may never run out of water in Scotland, but 1, we’ve had too little rain for quite a while now; 2, lessons learned in childhood are seldom forgotten; and 3, I care about the environment.

Water harvesting is the answer. And it’s not difficult.

I bought a 750 gallon rainwater tank a few years ago and it sits under my back window looking surprisingly innocuous. The down pipe from the back half of the house roof feeds it and it fills to overflowing in just one night of heavy rain.
The water in the full tank lets me water my (quite large by modern standards) garden, with a hosepipe and a pump, for at least 3 full waterings.

In prolonged dry spells I divert the shower and wash basin “grey” water to it. This is less pleasant than rainwater and can develop a bit of a whiff over a number of hot days, but it’s fine for the garden.

I also have an old oak whiskey barrel sat the side of the greenhouse into which greenhouse roof and hut roof rainwater drains. That has a pump into the greenhouse and I can water everything in the greenhouse for at least a week from a full barrel.

In dire circumstances I can even run the hosepipe form the water tank by the house to the oak barrel by the greenhouse to transfer water to where it’s most needed, thus using bathroom “grey” water in the greenhouse.

If I had suitable access I could have had a much bigger tank buried under my lawn and routinely harvested ALL the rain from ALL of the house roof AND all the “grey” water too, but I’m afraid my garden opens for charity so massive and slow-recovery jobs like that are not yet on the cards.

I will follow any ban that there is, but I have to say that the point about seeing millions of gallons leak from water board pipes is a very valid one. The last time we had a hosepipe ban that affected me I was on to the papers like shot because it came 4 months after Yorkshire Water had employed sub-contractors to replace all the Fire Hydrants in the streets round here. They did that in the January one year and every single one of the new hydrants was left leaking at a very fast rate, leaving sheets of ice over the roads for week on end. Many people reported the leaks many times and each time we were all told that they were “in a system of priority”, but come the April of the sam year we had a hosepipe ban and still all the hydrants were pouring gallons into the road. The papers came and took pictures of some of the leaks that were so fierce that the force of the water was lifting the iron covers off the hydrants. Oddly enough when the paper published the pictures and pointed out the irony of a hosepipe ban with this going on, the water board men were out within 12 hours digging them all up and doing the job properly.

It does always make me wonder if we would ever need a hosepipe ban or to declare a drought ever again if all the leaking mains were fixed.

I take it that I am still allowed to syphon ‘grey’ water (from a morning shower) into my garden using a hose? It would be a waste to just let this water flow down the plug but I’m worried I’ll get fined for using a hose.

We just received our metered water bill from Anglian Water for the next half year – £300 – but no effort has been made to include details of the hosepipe ban. Looking more closely at the charges there is an assumption that 90% of the water taken goes back into the sewers so the serewerage charge is almost as high as the water supply charge. Unless we can prove that a high percentage of the water drawn from the supply goes back into the ground and not down drains or via run-off onto the highway there is no relief from this level of charge.
We do water the garden quite a lot during dry periods because we have invested heavily in it and, because of its siting, it is almost all on display. Obviously we will comply with the ban but the water butts do not last long during hot spells and lugging water cans around is no joke. We have a trickle irrigation system covering part of the garden and it seems that so long as this is operated via a timer and pressure reducing valve it is permitted during the ban. We shall be looking to extend the system all round the garden. Apparently there is no maximum permitted time for operating a timer-controlled system. With sensible monitoring and control this should keep the more vulnerable plants and flowers alive while misinimsing consumption. Pots, boxes and tubs are the bane because they need much more watering due to leakage and evaporation; we no longer have hanging baskets which took proportionately more.
Looking at Anglian Water’s website details of the implications of the ban, I see that use of a hosepipe is permitted “in the course of a business to clean a private motor vehicle, or for cleaning walls or windows of domestic premises, paths or patios or an artificial outdoor surface, where this is done as a service to customers”. So I can get some self-employed bloke in to clean the paving and paths with a jet wash machine but I can’t do it myself more economically just using my own hosepipe.
Much as I agree that the volume of mains water leakage is a mighty scandal, I also feel that the opportunity has been missed to make sensible investment in water resources and conservation. Great Britain is a predominantly wet island, with a dimishing amount of water-using industry, yet we have this nonsense of enforced restrictions starting as soon as a little sunshine occurs. So much fresh water flows out of East Anglia into the North Sea that could be treated and reintroduced into the supply or used to recharge the aquifer where the supply is drawn from boreholes. Oddly, some of the river water from the Great Ouse that would otherwise disappear into The Wash is diverted via channels from Norfolk to a massive reservoir in Essex [where much of it evaporates]. Norfolk has a hosepipe ban; the parts of Essex and Suffolk supplied by the Essex & Suffolk Water Company don’t.

This is a serious matter and one which will impact increasingly over the years unless we are very lucky. I’ve commented in depth before about my own, admittedly full-on, water saving and won’t bore everyone again. However I am reminded of one of my old grandmother’s favourite sayings when I hear people justifying their wastage by quoting the amounts lost in leakage by the water companies: “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” Water companies should be brought to book if leaks are not mended promptly and clearly this doesn’t always happen. Of course there is a political issue here too. They used to supply water as a right in a civilised society. Now they are international companies which report to shareholders and must make an operating profit to survive. If there was one piece of legislation I could change, the privitisation of water supplies would be high on my wish list.

Can anyone tell me why I have to pay £20 more for my water bill this year when I cannot use my hose, surely the water companys should not be allowed to increase our bills when they are not providing a full service!!!!!!!

It has taken me nearly an hour searching to discover that Hampshire is NOT in the ban.

Why so difficult – Why no map to make it clear who is banned?

Is it a secret?

There is a very simple solution to the water shortage in the south, albeit now an expensive one. All that is needed is a water grid and this could be simply acheived by interconnecting each separate water company’s system to the adacent company. In this way the grid would cover the whole of Gt Britain. Capacity flows would be somewhat less than building a new very expensive water grid, but inter-company transfers could be controlled and scheduled overnight when water demand and flows are lower.

A national grid with new interconnecters would be ideal, but more expensive. When the first British electricty grid was proposed in the 1920s, many engineers said this would not work due to many technical problems and they were wrong. The water companies do not want such a grid because this would introduce competition and this is why they keep opposing the idea and putting up objections. Other countries have intergrated systems that works. The Government should insist that such connections are made or a grid is built and the introduction of competition would sooon result in reduced prices.

We pay more to Southen Water for taking our waste water than we do to SE Water for our water supply and this is obvious nonsense.

Jonathon Richardson says that desalination is experimental and whilst it is expensive, this is not experimental and is a proven technology with plants in most of the Gulf states and a new plant in this country on the Thames near London which is now in operation.

What exceptions are there for the disabled unable to carry watering cans ?

The media and many commentators quickly identify the increase in the number of dwellings as the cause of our difficulties, but is this not a simplistic excuse? More and more of the new dwellings have either no garden or a very small one, and many of them are under-occupied relative to their capacity. Yes the population is rising, and thus the need for water, but equally people are being more and more conscientious in their use of water, and domestic systems [toilet cisterns, dishwashers, washing machines] are much more economical than they used to be. Furthermore, the amount of water extracted by industry has fallen heavily. The major increase in water consumption is crop production. Sprayed irrigation is now a massive [and extremely inefficient] user of water in England and it is largely driven by the desire to maximise yields and programme the harvesting so that the right product can go on the supermarket shelves – often outside its “proper” season. There is no reason why more waste water could not be reintroduced into supply after treatment; the discharge is potable but is dumped into rivers and flows out to the sea.

I have connected water butts collecting from one side of my roof. But I live in a relatively modern house which makes it difficult to get hold of grey water as all the pipes are connected directly to soil pipes inside the structure of the house. You may be able to siphon from a bath, but it is not practical from a shower!
I am only able to collect from one side of the house as the other side slopes down to gutters which are on my neighbours side so I cannot collect as much as I would like.
Another thing that seems such a waste is combination boilers. We may be saving energy, but if you want hot water you have to run the tap and waste water instead. At least if you were able to catch grey water you would be able to use it again. We tend to use the kettle to boil water for washing up rather than run the tap.

I have written an alternative proposal to the hosepipe ban – you can read it here: http://www.centreforum.org/index.php/mainpublications/339-hosepipe-bans-are-not-the-answer, and you can read the Daily Telegraph write up here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/drought/9203704/Hosepipe-bans-are-unfair-on-households-says-Liberal-Democrat-think-tank.html.
I think it makes sense, but do email me with any comments.

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I am a keen gardener (open under the National garden scheme) and Which? subscriber. In my case it is quite hard to redirect bath water (etc), as my bathroom is in the middle of the house, and has no external wall. I also have concrete floors. My roof water already goes into soakaways in the garden, and my shed roof water is piped to the fishpond.