The rising cost of our water!

In light of the recent water price rise announcements, I was looking at my water bill and wondered why it can’t be explained more easily, for example how many litres of water do I use in a period and what is the cost per litre of water.

My bill measures water delivered in Cubic Meters (M³). Who can visualise how much that is?  Litres are easier to grasp.

That got me thinking about what all the UK water companies charge, so I went over to the OFWAT site.

Our vision is for a water industry that delivers a world-class service, representing best value to customers now and in the future.

Now you would think that finding out what all the UK water companies charge their customers for water would be straight forward. Say using a link from OFWAT’s home page straight to a table with all the relevant information.

Maybe it’s supposed to be a secret! However, after two phone calls to OFWAT and two of OFWAT’s staff looking in their files, they managed to give me a link location on their web site to… an Excel spreadsheet!!

So I’ve downloaded that file, turned it into HTML (that’s another story) added a column that shows the cost per litre of delivered water.

I think this now gives a good idea of what the cost of water is for the UK companies using something that’s easy to understand – the Litre!

A word about the figures in the Volume columns…

The figure in the m³ column of 120.83p is £1 and 20.83pence. The figure of 0.121p  in the Litre column is .121 of a pence, quite small, but still significant if you use 1,000 litres, which would amount to £1.21, but you need to work out your own cost for your own water bill.

I’m going to update this table a bit more with some further info I’ve obtain in  a day or two.

Finally, as it’s not been published directly on the web in tabular form before that I could find, I suppose I can claim a first!!!

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