Hosepipe ban just came into effect this evening, which has made watering the garden a nuisance as I'm having to do it with watering cans.
I don't think I was using lots of excess water with the hose anyway, so I reckon the savings there are pretty small.
I'm clearly not just going to let all the plants and the lawn die.
What irritates me is that the what had precipitated (excuse the pun) this ban is the increase in water use from about 160 litres a day to 200 litres a day, which in a population of 1.8 million is 72 million litres a day, when leaks in the mains supply accounts for over 160 million litres a day.
I don't see why I should not water my garden when NI water cant be bothered to fix their leaks.
It's the equivalent to having the fuel line leaking in my car so under hard acceleration the engine is starved of fuel, and suggesting the solution is to avoid accelerating.
Obviously leaks can't be reduced to 0, but that's 37% of our water wasted in leaks, a figure which doesn't appear to have improved since 2002. Even worse, NI water regard this as "hitting their target" as we're only wasting 161 million litres a day rather than 167 million.
(Figures from NI water public accounts publications)
We live in a country where it rains 50% of the year, surely water shortages in summer are avoidable?
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Nil Satis Nisi Optimum
Took the dog for a walk across the park today and starting to look like the summer of 76 now
https://www.stwater.co.uk/about-us/reservoir-levels/raw-water-storage-levels-18-june-2018/
Last time Thames tried to build a new reservoir the locals went nuts, citing the leakage argument. The majority of Thames water leaks are underneath London, if they dig London up to fix the ageing Victorian pipes then they get grief from road users. It's a tough problem to solve - esp. with their, at times, (cough) dodgy accounting practices.
At the end of the day, it's hot and in hot weather grass dries out. The water that people waste on keeping their lawns looking lush is good enough quality that you can feed it to your baby.
I don't think it's too much of an ask to manage this precious resource as much as possible.
I don't know the NI situation but I guess they are not a big enough entity to have massive resources to work with.
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Doesn't look like there's a hosepipe ban for Anglian Water currently, so I'll give our back garden desert a soak this evening.