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What You Need To Know About Surface Water Drainage.
The UK is renowned for its wet and windy weather, which can be both a blessing and a curse. It’s great if you’re a fan of gardening and like to see your flowers bloom but otherwise it can prove to be quite the nuisance.
No doubt you’ve noticed after a lot of heavy rainfall that there’s a lot of surface water collecting on your property. But have you ever wondered what happens to it once it’s fallen from the sky?
In actual fact, part of the fee your water supplier will charge you includes surface water drainage because gutters divert it into sewage systems. You’re being charged for the water supply coming to your site but also for the waste water flowing through your supplier’s and sewers.
The various water companies will charge for this drainage in different ways. Some, for example, will calculate all waste water charges proportionate to how much water is supplied to your site. So the more water you use, the more you’re assumed to need disposal for.
Other suppliers, meanwhile, will charge a flat rate based on a rateable value assigned to your property. And others still will fix a drainage fee based on the area of land your property is situated on.
As you can probably already see, the main issue here is that all of these approaches don’t reflect exactly how much surface water is being drained. So chances are that you’re actually being charged more than if this drainage water was measured more accurately.
But the good news is that you can reduce your drainage costs, simply by accurately calculating the surface water flow. Once you have this information, you can use it to discuss reducing your charges with your water supplier – and even possibly get a refund for all the years you’ve been overcharged for this service.
The team here at H2O Building Services will come to carry out a desktop audit of your site to analyse the number of gutters, roads and path runaways, as well as estimating the average rainfall. Once this is done, we can work out an estimated figure for your drainage volumes and then compare it to your bills to see if there are any big discrepancies between charges and what your actual drainage needs are.
We were recently brought in to help a national animal charity to do just that. After sending in to water bills for all of the organisation’s sites to our water audit department, we compiled a water and waste water database.
The report showed that the charity could potentially save £24,000 a year on surface water charges and not only that but possible refunds because of historical water billing errors or overcharging reached an impressive £131,000!
So as you can see, it’s certainly worth looking into so you can save money in the future and also possibly recoup any cash from previous years… what a great way to start 2018!