If you have more bedrooms than people, you are probably paying for water you do not use. This is how unmetered bills are worked out, the simple test for whether a meter would save you money and the safety net that lets you switch back if it does not.
Water is the household bill nobody examines. It is smaller than energy, it arrives less often and there is no switching market to make anybody think about it, because you cannot change your water company.
There is one decision available and for a large number of households it is worth a few hundred pounds a year in the wrong direction. Whether you are on a meter, or paying a fixed amount based on a valuation of your house from the 1970s.
Most people have never checked which side of that they are on.
The short version
- Unmetered bills are based on your home's rateable value, an assessment made decades ago, not on what you use
- The rule of thumb: if you have more bedrooms than people, a meter usually saves money
- In England and Wales your supplier normally has to fit a meter free if you ask
- If a meter cannot be fitted you can usually be moved to an assessed charge instead
- There is normally a trial period to change back, commonly around two years, so check yours
- Scotland and Northern Ireland work differently and this decision does not arise in the same way
How an unmetered bill is worked out
If you have no meter, your bill is based on the rateable value of your property. That is an assessment of what your home could have been let for, carried out for the old domestic rating system; for most properties it was last done in the 1970s and has not been revisited since.
So the amount you pay for water bears no relationship to how much water you use. It relates to how a valuation officer assessed your house half a century ago.
This produces some odd results. A large house with one person in it pays a lot. A small house with five people in it pays comparatively little. Neither figure moves if your usage changes, which means there is no way to reduce an unmetered bill by using less.
The test that answers it for most people
The rough rule the industry itself uses is simple: if there are more bedrooms in your home than people living in it, a meter is likely to save you money.
It works because unmetered charges scale with the size of the property and metered charges scale with the number of people using water.
Some situations where a meter usually wins:
- One or two people in a house with three or more bedrooms
- A retired couple in the family home after the children have left
- Anybody away frequently, or with a second property standing empty much of the time
And where it usually does not:
- More people than bedrooms, which often means sharers or a large family
- A garden that gets watered heavily through summer, or a pool or hot tub
- Households where somebody has a medical need for high water use, though there is a separate scheme for that
Every water company publishes a calculator that estimates a metered bill from your household size and habits. Use your own company's rather than a general one, because charges vary considerably by region.
Getting one fitted
In England and Wales you can ask your water company to install a meter and they are normally required to do it free of charge.
Sometimes it is not practical. Shared supply pipes are the usual reason, which is common in flats and older terraces, where several properties draw from one pipe and there is nowhere sensible to measure yours alone. If a meter cannot be fitted, you can generally ask to be put on an assessed charge instead: a fixed amount based on the type of property and how many people live there, rather than on the old rateable value. For a small household in a large house, that is often better than the unmetered bill even though it is not measured.
A few practical points. Find out where the meter will go, since it may be outside at the boundary or inside under the sink. Read it when it is fitted and note the number. And if you are on a water meter already, take a reading yourself occasionally rather than relying on estimates, for the same reason as with energy bills.
The other thing a meter gives you
A meter measures a leak just as faithfully as it measures a bath.
That sounds like a disadvantage and is usually the opposite. A slow leak on your side of the boundary can run for years unnoticed, because water disappears into the ground without ever appearing on a wall or a ceiling. Unmetered, you would never know. Metered, the bill climbs and something is obviously wrong.
The standard test takes a minute. Turn off every tap and appliance that uses water, note the meter reading and take it again an hour later without using anything. If it has moved, water is going somewhere it should not.
Most water companies will repair a leak on the supply pipe between the boundary and the house once for free and many will reduce a bill inflated by a leak you have since fixed. Neither happens automatically, so ask.
If you decide to switch
Do three things and the decision more or less makes itself.
First, find your current annual cost. It is on your bill and it is the number you are comparing against.
Second, run your own supplier's calculator honestly, including the garden and any long baths. An optimistic answer helps nobody.
Third, note the date you switch and set a reminder well before the trial period ends. That is the point at which you can look at a full year of real bills and decide properly, rather than trying to remember whether it felt cheaper.
That last step is the one people miss and it is the one that turns a reversible decision into a permanent one by default.
Keep an eye on what the house costs
homehogs tracks your water bills alongside the rest, so a year on a meter can be compared with the year before it rather than guessed at.
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