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You can save water by putting a brick in your kettle

Or you could run the water from your wort chiller into your bath and use that to wash instead of taking showers.

Another option would be to simply stop washing yourself and your clothes. You might be surprised how quickly you get used to the smell and you will always have your own seat on public transport.

I think the cost to a brewday would be minimal.A quick look on DCC[/url:j0h3jrn6]website shows that a cubic metre(1000L) of water costs a business €1.64
So if we say a brew with a final volume of 20L requires 100L for everything invloved on brew day then the water cost is less than 20cent.(BTW It'll cost you about 2cent to flush the toilet)
Ye I know thats business rates but in the UK I think the cost is something similar for domestic water charges.

I hate wasting the water. It takes my chiller about 40+L (depending on outside temp of course) to get my wort down to pitching temp, so i collect that and either use it to clean up,sterilise bottles etc.

"kenmc":1k1yf4v2 wrote: Will be very interesting to see how they plan to retrofit meters to existing houses, [b:1k1yf4v2]especially in apartment blocks[/b:1k1yf4v2] etc where there's probably a very centralized main water feed which would be difficult to tap into to add the meters.[/quote:1k1yf4v2]
Fitting the meters is not difficult and for apartments I'd imagine the apartment block would be charged as a group and then those cost applied to the annual rates. I wouldn't be surprised if that's already happening.

The houses is an interesting one. I wonder what type of meters they'll be, were they propose to install them and how they plan to read the meters.

It's not like Gas meters that are always external and generally out front in a dedicated meter box where it's easy for Bord Gais to take readings.

Mains water supply is nearly always at the back of a house where the kitchen is and it comes up through the floor (generally under the sink) so thereby indoors and not to easy to take a reading from outside. <!-- s:D --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_biggrin.gif" alt="" title="Very Happy" /><!-- s:D -->

Kildare County Council use meters that have transmitters that can be read remotely so maybe that's the plan. But again, if you had extreme water usage I'd imagine it wouldn't be difficult to bypass the meter, especially if it's fitted internally.

If you really do want to reduce the amount of water used by your chiller, you could pre chill your water.

The idea is to use two immersion chillers in series, with the first sitting in an ice bath. The water from the tap runs through the first chiller, cooling down as it passes though the ice, then on to the second chiller, which is sitting in your hot wort. This would chill your beer faster, thus saving water.

[quote:343f3mc3]marceldesailly

(BTW It'll cost you about 2cent to flush the toilet) [/quote:343f3mc3]
Thats a great idea. We could save the expense of putting in meters and having bill ssnet out by just throwing 5 cent into the toilet everytime we used it. They could filter out the coins at the end and all our water would be paid for.