Water Conservation Gardening

Is that growing in a bag, with the top tied (like a bin bag)? Sorry for being thick, but I grow a lot of spuds. I dont earth up either;I just plant them in an old bathtub and other things..seem to get decent little spuds all over winter too. I've never really known which way to plant our 'rooting' spuds that I get given to plant!

 

As an ex water treatment engineer for some 35 years Its really very nice to see the precautions you guys are willing to take to preserve the wet stuff.
I can tell you that the guys at the sharp end who treat the stuff for you and distribute it are a 24/7 team and work way beyond the normal to ensure this is done.
In Yorkshire the res levels are at 92% and are looking good. I suspect that the river extract and ground water plants are being pushed at this time to preserve the reservior levels.
Theres a lot of talk about quantities above.
Let me just say that the works at Elvington (when I was there) could produce 200+TCM a day. Thats 200 thousand cubic metres plus of potable every 24 hours.
I shall leave you to do the math and work out how many mugs of tea that is at about 300ml per mug.

 

Front or rear garden, lol !

 

The water shortage seems a long time ago now after 3 months of heavy rainfall two of which were record highs!

 

That's simply remarkable. you're only maybe just 150 miles south. Yesterday and Thursday we had flash floods. The topsoil is wet and has been since April. Is there still a hosepipe ban down there?

 

Shiney, It amazes me when i travel to places like Southen Spain, where they have hot arid conditions for long periods and sparse rainfall in the winter they don't seem to have much problem. We live in a country that borders the North Atlantic which gets much more average rainfall than most europen countries yet they impose hosepipe bans. Water companies should get their act together and provide a service that we pay good money for and not just a cash cow for investors. If they wont they should be nationalised!

 

Hi Shiney
Well Spain's population is lower than ours granted, but add on 10 million odd people who holiday there and (boy oh boy they use plenty of water) there isn't much difference. Spain is much larger in land mass, and climatically much hotter therefore water will evaporate much quicker yet they don't have a problem getting water to people who want hose their gardens.
The average tempreture in central and southern Spain is above 70f for 6 months of the year and rainfall is much less. An average of nearly 6 inches of rain fell in the UK in June! so yes, if they can't harvest it properly they are criminally Lax! Paying dividends to shareholders and fat salaries to executives overides the need to actually put profits back into the infrastructure to meet our needs. We all know though in real life that doesn't happen. Severn Trent (my local company) have increased their prices annualy above inflation since it was privatised and OFWAT let them do it. Also in May they gave shareholders an extra 'Special dividend' of £150 million.
This is what Angelos Anastasiou at Investec warned: “The company has just increased customer bills by 5.2pc, so in these recessionary times, the payment of a special dividend might still be viewed as somewhat inflammatory.”
You bet it's inflammatory!

 

Much easier to tool-up for a job when you have a consistent issue to solve. In Spain they have a "grey water" distribution network for watering plants. I resent putting main-water, cleaned & suitable for drinking, onto my garden, but I certainly would not want to pay for a grey-water distribution network to be retro-fitted. I would like to see water companies and/or government providing incentives for householders to store water; new-build houses should be legally required to include rainwater harvesting for loo-flushing, car washing, garden watering etc. and water meters should be installed for 100% of the housing stock immediately (I'm quite happy for people on low incomes to have their benefits increased commensurately, but meters would introduce a much better sense of frugality and provide incentive to get dripping taps fixed etc.). We reduced our (metered) water usage here by 50% over a period of about 3 years (after we collectively decided that we "should") by adopting some relatively straightforward measures - timers on all outdoor taps, mulching of the garden, water-butts on all downpipes, not flushing loos when we have a pee, full loads in washing machine, etc. its not rocket science.

That is exactly the reason. In normal seasons we get enough rain for the infrastructure to cope just fine. In South East we had (up until they announced a hosepipe ban!!) the dries 18 months on record - that is not something a nation can afford to tool up for. You assuming that the water companies should install infrastructure to cope with infrequent droughts is a pipedream, you certainly will not going to want to pay what it would cost, and even if the populous would pay it would be an obscene waste of money and energy (e.g. installing a national-grid & pumping capability North-South); getting people to use less, and more wisely, should be the first priority.

Kent et al is an exception in my mind, far too much housing-stock built without the infrastructure having been upgraded to accommodate it - some officials should be pilloried as a result, but THAT never happens

I don't know how old you are, but if you are young you will not have lived through the period where the infrastructure, when the industry was nationalised, was run into the ground.

I'm not a champion of the water companies, nor the ludicrous way they have chosen to finance the improvement of the infrastructure (which requires them to make massive profits which consumers then rightly associate with Fat Cat mentality), but there is no denying that they have spent a huge amount of money improving the infrastruacture since they were de-nationalised; no doubt we could debate how well they have spent that money, etc., but I don't suppose they are just sitting around having bonfires of £10 notes ...

 

Hi Kristen,
Oh, I'm well old enough remember water privitaisation Without getting too political privitisation has brought greed. It's in peoples nature to be greedy, most people are and if they can find ways of satisfying their greed they will take advantge. Water company executives are no exception. I have two bills a year for water 'rates.' I have to pay them I have no other option because I don't have a choice of supplier and there's no competiton. In other words they operate a monopoly.
Water companies make huge amounts of profit from rainwater which falls from the sky, all they have to do is get it to us. At least power companies has to buy their product, Water companies get it for free.
Of course they would have us all on water metres despite us living in the one of the wettest countries in Europe, that would suit them fine, less for them to supply.
I'll be damned if they ration water to me when I pay good money for their obligation to supply me with fresh water. It's their part of the deal to provide a service and not make excuses if we have dry spell. They have to deal with it.
I really hope you read this link from the Independant which highlights just how much water is lost through leakages...it's simply staggering. They have increased water bills way over the rate of inflation to tackle this problem but they are failing badly year in year out.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...every-single-day-through-leakage-2034999.html

 

I do consider the Independent a likely-trusted source, but the article is 2 years old and is completely at odds with what OffWat are saying now. When this was discussed here a month or so ago I went looking for information, so forgive me for not re-finding the citations and quoting from memory, but my recollection is that OffWat currently says that the water companies have reduced the leaks by 1/3rd since Privatisation - whereas Independent 2 years ago was saying it had increased since Privatisation. They can't both be right, and I have no idea which is right, but like I said earlier a huge sum has been spent on infrastructure and hopefully the majority well-spent.

I hear all this bru-ha-ha about leaks, the amounts are staggering ... but I don't know of anyone who has seen / reported a leak that has not been fixed within a day or two. We've had a couple here in the last 3 or 4 years as the 10" or 12" main runs through the edge of our property; they were fixed within a couple of days. It is, however, telling that there have been two leaks in as many years within 100 yards of each other - presumably the pipe is knackered and the whole thing overdue for replacement ...

People tell me that the deep underground leaks go unnoticed, and the water company just reduces the pressure. May well be, presumably caused by ancient infrastructure that had no routine scheduled maintenance when it was nationalised - as usual, at various times, Government took money from one-pocket because they needed it in another pocket - so budgets were run year-on-year like a yo-yo which is no way to run a railroad, so to speak. I am sure that replacing a broken pipe that is under houses in a town is not a straightforward job, and having been neglected for eons means that more is needing fixing each year than there is time or money to do ... so it will take years - decades? - to get to a point where more is being fixed than breaks.

Water doesn't just fall out of the sky like you say - well it does, but like I said, people need rainwater harvesting to make use of it, and I'd be keen to see that widely subsidised. The stuff that comes out of the tap costs money to collect, build reservoirs to store, or to pump out of the ground. The stuff you seem to think you have a right to is what you can collect in a bucket, not what comes out of a tap, and you certainly aren't paying, not would you be prepared to pay, for an infrastructure capable of sustaining a rare drought; if you have a hosepipe ban every year then sure you have a valid gripe (although in the majority of water areas customers on Water Rates aren't allowed to use a hose at all, so that point is moot). As I understand it the water companies wanted folk to save 10% of usage, and the hosepipe ban was designed to a) achieve that and b) make people aware of their obligation. Of course the record breaking rains have resolved the issue anyway ...

I do agree that it is nuts that there are still monopolies, and I don't know the reason, but it probably has to do with each area being told to sort its infrastructure out, which would not be realistic if they could not make money from their customers if someone somewhere else could undercut them on price, so we have OffWat controlling any outrageous price increases. I'm sure there is horse trading involved, but the water companies will at the very least have to justify price increases.

I think the whole mega-profit this is daft too, but that's how they have chosen to "borrow money" to pay for the infrastructure cost - i.e. by shareholders (predominantly pension funds and the like) stumping up the money, and in return the water companies have to declare large profits so that the dividends pay for the "borrowings". It would be much better, and transparent, and also not nark Jo Public, if the water companies had just taken out a bank loan instead. It doesn't suit newspapers to say "Fantastic water profits which are repaying the cost of the infrastructure upgrades AND going straight into your pension fund" but rather to print the headline "Obscene water company profit" and leaving out any explanation of why - as is typical of newspapers, who's only objective is to "sell copy" as lord justice Leveson is uncovering ...