A lesson in water

Yesterday, at reference 1, I declared open season on Thames Water, their having seem fit to near double my monthly water charge. Obviously something wrong with their meter, almost certainly the result of unfortunate interaction with the BT fibre people who had been digging in a watery part of the road.

A cover very like the one in the pavement out front

Then a bit later, I thought I would attempt to read the meter for myself. Which turned out to be down the bottom, say about a foot down, of a flooded white plastic cylinder. With a black plastic outer cover and a very messy, white polystyrene plug below that. Black plastic cover looked to me to be a long way off waterproof - so in wet weather one might expect the cylinder to be flooded the whole time, given our clay. Hole not deep enough to break through into the chalk.

A bit like the view down my hole

Fetch beaker to bale out most of the water. Remove the odd leaf. Fetch egg cup to bale out some more water. By which time the dial is just about above the water level. Remove a black plastic gadget I now think is used to turn the water off, on the Thames Water side of the meter. Put it aside.

So we now have something like the snap above, except there the plastic cylinder is not flooded and it is not the same model of meter. But the same sort of idea. A spinner in the middle which is stationary when no water is flowing into the house and which spins fast when you turn a tap on. Our spinner, was rather different and it was quite easy to count the revolutions, something close to 20 a minute. At this rate my version of the larger red dial was visibly moving although not revolving, the smaller red dial was not moving and the cubic metre counter certainly was not. A counter which I read, with some difficulty, as 4,214.8.

A bit more like the view down my hole

We did not have a ticket from Thames Water. But the black plastic gadget can be seen immediately to the right of the shut-off, running top right to bottom left. Click to enlarge.

In any event, our meter was quite difficult to read, even with the aid of a torch. Maybe I should have fetched down my monocular.

After a bit, I decided that there was nothing to be done in the hole and put it all back together again. Back to the bill from Thames Water, which said that the meter man who had visited a few days before had made it 4,237. But he had not bothered to bale the cylinder out and he had complained about it. The bill also said that we used around a cubic metre of water a day, with each metre costing of the order of £2.

Back to the Thames Water web site. Thames Water being one of the few people I am not registered online with, I attempted registration. Several times. But despite being armed with a shiny new account number, taken from the bill which had just arrived, I could not register and look at my account. See what the history was. Although I did find some talk of system upgrades.

Poked around to try and find out where to complain about a faulty meter. Got nowhere. Dark thoughts about what a rubbish web site it was. But eventually I arrived at the Thames Water Twitter account. It did not let me tweet but it did let me page down, where I stumbled across a tweet, complete with pictures, which explained that a slowly leaking valve in the cistern of a toilet could get through 200 litres a day and cost people on meters hundreds of pounds a year.

Now I knew that our downstairs cistern valve was leaking slightly, but had thought nothing of it. But now the penny dropped. The sums added up, with the slight leakage accounting for the £40 hike in our monthly charge. So the system works: by being on a meter, I actually keep an eye on things, and now know that I really do need to do something about this leak. Even if it has taken a while. Which added up across the Thames Water area must amount to a huge amount of wasted water. To which has to be added all the much larger leaks in their part of the system.

YouTube helpfully explains that if I go down to the plumbers' merchants in Blenheim Road I could get the necessary part for £20 and fit it in less than half an hour.

But then I remembered that I have a maintenance contract for such things from British Gas, so I might as well get something for the money I pay them. And maybe they will be able to fit a new syphon washer on the other cistern while they are at it - having fitted something cut out of a plastic bag last time, which does not work terribly well. Probably the wrong sort of plastic bag - stiff fertilizer bags being what is needed, not floppy shopping bags. As it happens, I have now got a supply of the necessary washers and will be able to give one to the man when he turns up next week. The booking an engineer part of the British Gas contract working very well.

Watch this space.

PS 1: annoying that I have fitted these syphon washers myself in the past, and it was easy enough - but I no longer remember how it is done. Much easier to let British Gas do it than bother my head about it, especially now that I can supply them with the necessary washers.

PS 2: rather late in the day, I remembered about advice from TB about not poking around in ground water, particularly near drains and sewers, with bare hands and arms. Which carried the risk of getting infected with some unpleasant, possibly fatal, rat borne disease. Asking Bing, probably Weil's disease, said to be rare and usually either very mild or treatable. Also known as leptospirosis. At least this particular ground water was not very near a drain and I would think the assembly as a whole was rat proof - if not water proof. But another space to watch.

Reference 1: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/01/stones-still-wet.html. 

Reference 2: https://www.thameswater.co.uk/.