Express & Star

LETTER: Radical water idea not thought through

The current hot weather has prompted a national daily to run a front page story on saving water, by using your bath and washing up water on the garden.

Published
Water, water everywhere...

The official watchdog spokesperson, Miss Rachel Fletcher the head of Ofwat, told MPs.

She has not thought this radical idea through.

To re-pipe the bath water and kitchen sink out into the garden, and into holding tanks/water butts is not a viable option.

Neither is collecting it in buckets, and lugging it down a flight of stairs. The same for the kitchen sink.

A gallon of water weighs 10lb approximately, a bath full of water holds about 80 gallons that’s about 800 pounds, so, how many times has old Mrs Muggins got to stagger up and down her carpeted, and now soggy stairs, to soak her garden with contaminated water.

The kitchen fares no better, same scenario, with added food waste.

If HMG is willing to pay for the 26 million UK homes that have gardens, for plumbers to re-pipe from home to garden, no problem, if not the honourable lady is talking out of her behind. We are an island nation, surrounded by water, with a comprehensive river system, and a canal infrastructure that is the envy of the world.

The obscene profits made by the water supply companies would be better suited constructing more reservoirs, and not into the pockets of corporate directors, and shareholders.

Rain water butts are now a common sight in some gardens, mine are now empty, as it has not rained here in three weeks.

As for lugging buckets of hot dirty water down a flight of carpeted stairs, along and through the house, and into my garden no sir, it will not happen, not in this Englishman’s castle.

The onus is on the water providers, that is their job, Nowhere on this island is more than 72 miles from the sea . . . desalination plants?

Tony Levy

Wednesfield