This drought in southeast England has gone on too long. My water butts are now empty. My cauliflower shoots have brown curling edges. My raspberries have little brown buds instead of ripening berries. Only the two hanging baskets with geraniums and the pot with yellow dahlias near my front door are still flourishing, and that is because I have been tipping my kitchen water on them daily.
Using water in a new climate
It is a stark sign of climate change that our rainy northern island is now so short of water. What are the water companies doing about this? We cannot simply wait for another decade until the new reservoir being built near Canterbury is ready for use. Many people ask – what about stopping the leaks? This is never-ending work on aging pipes. South East Water spent £1.7bn from April 2021 to March 2025, and plans to spend £1.91bn over the next five years. The company’s website contains detailed service commitments, and the website for the water industry explains the ongoing battle to replace aging pipes.
For long-term planning, and even for this emergency season of drought, the calculation is that everyone needs to REDUCE water consumption to reach a stated target of 122 litres per person per day by 2038 and 110 litres per day by 2050. A poll by Water UK showed that many people underestimate their household water use at 62 litres per day, whereas the average is actually 323 litres! So, how can we get the message across that everyone in this region of the world now needs to start saving water?
Are you a savvy saver?
I looked at the messaging on my account with South East Water. It starts with the appealing ‘Fancy some FREE water-saving devices?’ (OK – we are a nation of shoppers looking for bargains!), and then it acknowledges that ‘perhaps you care about doing your bit for the environment?’ I clicked enthusiastically. I found I could order some things for free, like the special gel to hydrate a pot plant, and a timer for a shower. There is also a 10% reduction on the price of water butts, so I ordered one with a capacity of 227 litres for £52.
The plumber arrives
I also noticed one could order a free water-saving visit, so I clicked on that. A week or so later, Dave, an experienced plumber and team leader, duly turned up with a bucket full of goodies. I explained I wanted to record the process to write this article.
The first thing he did was check my meter and current water usage. If the meter reading changed during our conversation, we would know there was a leak somewhere on my property. Of course, it is possible to check your usage from your water bill, but that comes from readings every six months. You can then estimate on the South East Water website whether your usage is typical or excessive, via ‘how do I compare with my neighbours?’ (neighbours = customers in my region, not my street!). The average is 195 litres per day. Dave told me that most people underestimate their usage, for instance assuming they only use 30 litres per person per day! Smart meters display daily use, but these are being rolled out only gradually in Kent, starting with the Canterbury and Whitstable area.
Toilets old and new
I then accompanied him while he checked each appliance systematically. The first was a toilet upstairs, which he tested using a piece of absorbent paper in the bowl to see if there was a leak. There was none, but he explained that toilets with push-button flush can leak 200–1000 litres per day, and householders do not realise this until they see their water bills. Remember the old toilet tanks with a lever flush and a floating ball inside? Dave told me that they gave better warning of leaks because they had a pipe that directed the leak outside the property, where anybody could see it dripping from the building. Also, as I recall, it was easier to do a DIY fix by fiddling with the angle of the floating ball. But push-button toilet flush with NO overflow pipe took over the market once architects and householders needed to place toilets in the middle of a property (under the stairs, for instance) far from an outside wall for overflow. This seems to be a design challenge for manufacturers and plumbers. Dave mentioned a model by Dudley that remakes the modern push-button flush using an old type of syphon, which stops water flowing when there is a leak.
Water-saving bathroom gadgets
Then, Dave turned his attention to the bathroom basin. He has a freebie that he calls a ‘tap aerator’, which fits like a washer into the mouth of the tap. It reduces the rate of flow, but because it aerates, the flow pressure seems the same. He even has a plastic bag to measure 10 seconds of tap-running, which revealed that the tap was spewing 13 litres per 10 seconds, and with the aerator, that reduced to six–seven litres.
Then, we turned to the shower. Dave explained that many people underestimate the amount of water they use in the shower. A shower uses about 13 litres per minute. Many people take an average of four minutes in the shower (= 52 litres), but some luxuriate in the shower for much longer, making it even more extravagant than a bath (= 80 litres average) in water usage. So, to persuade customers to keep to the four-minute shower, one of the freebies is a four-minute hour-glass type mini-timer.
Then, for the future delight of my grandchildren, there is a new LUMINOUS shower-head. The Flowpoint Lumina shows a flashing green at the start for four minutes, solid green at four–five minutes, then turns solid red at five–seven minutes, and a pulsing RED thereafter. Hurrah – let’s convert the younger generation to sensible water usage with fun gadgets! A survey of new users of the Flowpoint Lumina shower-head in Sussex confirmed a reduction in the amount of water used. There was also a flow regulator for the shower-head, which works like the aerator on the taps.
Dishwasher vs. hand washing
When we went to the kitchen, I explained to Dave my frustration that the hot water takes so long to arrive from the hot water cylinder in the attic to the kitchen taps, and I waste water running it cold until the heated flow arrives. (I don’t waste this water in these droughty days, as I save it in a bowl for watering my plants.) Actually, my quickest solution is to just boil a kettle to get hot water for my kitchen sink. These days, I also prefer to use my dishwasher, as it is very efficient even for pots and pans. Dave confirmed that dishwashers are generally more efficient than washing up by hand, especially if people wash up under running water, which can utilise many more litres.
Water-saving eco settings
It is also better to use eco settings on the newer models of washing machine. A recent Which! article suggests eco settings can reduce water use from 12–13 litres down to about 9–10 litres for a full load. CCW suggests a saving of four litres per cycle, and Waterwise agrees that eco settings are more efficient.
Dave asked if I had a water softener machine. I used to have one, but I found it expensive, as I had to keep ordering more batches of the chemical salt it requires. He told me that if they malfunction, that can waste a tremendous amount of water, to the cost of the unwary water-bill payer. Not my problem now, as I have installed a nifty electronic device on the inlet pipe that mineralises our hard Kent water, so I no longer get calcified scale in my kettle. This is a better solution for drinking water, as water-softening chemicals remove the calcium, which is good for our bones.
Grey water is the future
We then went out to the garden, where Dave was willing to connect my new water butt to the gutter above AND re-route an outlet pipe from my bath to take my bath water into the now empty water butt in my front garden.
This led to discussion of the use of grey water (run-off from roofs in rainy weather, plus the outflow from dishwashers, washing machines, showers and baths). I said I was pleased that some public toilets are now placing basins on top of toilet flush tanks so that users can wash hands and the grey water then flushes straight into the toilet. Dave was so-so about this configuration, pointing out that it needed to be better designed so that the downflow of grey water could never contaminate the inflow pipe. However, Dave was enthusiastic about the overall trend to make better use of grey water, which the government is going to require for new builds. Also, he finds that more householders who ask for water-saving visits are trying to make connections to harvest grey water. There are well-designed rainwater diverters now, too, to catch all roof runoff from downpipes.
Spread the water-saving word!
I questioned Dave further about the size of the teams doing this water-saving work in the South East Water company area. He said they started small, with just four people (one team leader and three plumbers), and have now expanded to 14 plumbers with three team leaders. It is very important to spread the word that we must all get better at saving water. A visit from one of the plumbing team, plus all the freebies on offer, is a good way to start to reduce your own household’s water use to within the limits that are necessary in our water-stressed region.
