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But like Digeroo says, can you confirm with Lisa what she says about the water bill being 4x the rental revenue, because I reckon your site generates £2300 revenue, and no way is its water bill going to be £9200 for the year, £1075 more like.
Currently, the water bill for allotments is approx 4 x higher than rent collected and is currenty heavily subsidised by council tax payers.
Quote from: Unwashed on August 11, 2010, 16:44:17But like Digeroo says, can you confirm with Lisa what she says about the water bill being 4x the rental revenue, because I reckon your site generates £2300 revenue, and no way is its water bill going to be £9200 for the year, £1075 more like.This what Lisa saidQuoteCurrently, the water bill for allotments is approx 4 x higher than rent collected and is currenty heavily subsidised by council tax payers. so she wasnt talking about this one site. If there are a lot os plots in Birmingahm with low rents and lots of discounts its possible overall that water charges exceed net rent income.
The price looks very unfair to me....Only £6 difference between a half and a full plot.A pensioner on a full plot is only paying £2 more than those on a quarter plot.Taking the cost of water into account, those on a quarter plot seem to be paying a fair rent, while at the other end, a pensioner on a full plot is in effect, paying nothing.The new rates seem to do little, if anything at all to improve this.If BCC want to give 50% discount to pensioners, then fine, it is their allotments and we have the same here, but why should they get 50% off the water bill?The water companies are not giving a discount, so this means all the other plot holders are paying for other peoples water.I don't think it is a rent rise that is needed, more of a rent restructure.As to saving water, have you considered printing and sticking up posters of water saving tips.It would cost very little and even if the tips do not save much water directly it would help put a more positive angle on the need to save water.
We have got a notice on our gate that tells us that we can have 1000 litre butts and we can also fit a hose onto the tap and drip feed.I will get you a copy of this today when we go to the plot.We think this is stupidity cos if we were to stay there all day we could just move the hose around whilst we were working and I'm quite sure that we would empty the butt by the end of the day.This is not saving water in my opinion.
The problem seems to me to be the standpipes. If you've got a standpipe, you can attach a hose to it. So - if hoses are banned - why are there still standpipes? We have water tanks, operated by a ball valve. You can't attach a hosepipe to that.
interesting reading! One thing I would check would be for leaks. If your water bills are high because consumption is high, then I'd do a check for water leaks. I know our site did and fixed a few problems, and the bills are back down1066
Betty, if every plot has a water butt, why aren't they plumbed in to the mains? Then no-one would need a hose to fill their butt, so therefore no-one could use their hose for anything illegal....Everyone on our site checks for leaks constantly and reports any problem, which is dealt with immediately. And when we fitted a timer to turn the water off every night, our bill went down considerably.
With reference to using drip hoses off water butts, I think the council would not allow that but, you can use a hosepipe off a water butt!!
Apart from lack of council staff (which is not our main concern), we have to take into consideration the committees on the allotment sites. any secretary, treasurer etc will tell you how difficult rent period is, imagine doing it 4 times a year??? And for that reason, we vetoed the idea.