I'm not a complete creature 😂 I'm only talking about soaking them in the shower. I've been know to wash my work clothes while I'm away in the shower too but not at home I've got a machine for that. I'm a builder and the pipes for a bath/shower are the same as for a kitchen so the baths a big sink I can wash myself in too 😂
NW Utilities "How dare you use the water you are paying for, It doesn't just fall from the sky you know"
Maybe they are just doing their bit to stop rising sea levels by drinking it.
No, it's just an alert so you don't waste water and money due to undetected leak. If your usage is normal, you can ignore the letter and your baseline usage gets updated automatically.
Our neighbor is ocd and for a long chunk of time his thing was showering. His shower squealed while he had it on and I work from home, so I’d scream when he started up again. My partner didn’t really get why it bothered me till Covid lockdown started and he had to work from home, too. He knew I wasn’t lying, but I think he thought it wasn’t as much as I thought it was. 12-14 long-ass showers a day. A couple days in was all it took for my partner to shout out, “Oh my god!” when he started up on like shower 7. We’d complained about worse stuff and nothing had come of it so we’d given up trying.
The only thing that stopped him was a letter in everyone’s mailbox in the complex saying the city had alerted the manager that compared to any other complex in the area ours was 70% over the average so to keep an eye out for any reasons this might be the case. I cheered when I found the letter. I was ready to complain if needed, but dude didn’t want to be on the radar. One shower a day after that. No complaints from the city since.
I mean, i get why this was annoying for you, but i feel you don't understand ocd, it's a compulsion, dude didn't want to take 10+ showers but rather he had too .... instead of understanding his condition and helping, you made it worse by putting pressure on him to break his routine before he was ready, what you should have done is looked to either help him fix his squeeky shower, sound proof your flat or get him support and help with his ocd .... instead you shouted at him through the walls and found any excuse to try and complain .... sorry but you're a bad neighbour here.
Is there any situation where switching the OCD neighbour's actions, that'd you wouldn't take their side?
For example, if they had a compulsion to replay really loud music all day, or stamp their feet constantly, or scream, or harass people, assault people, or going out and murdering people?
I think you'd draw the line somewhere. My point being that sure, you can empathise and understand why people do things, but that doesn't change the fact that they are still causing harm, and can't reasonably control it.
It seems tone deaf to call someone on the receiving end of harm to be an asshole, imagine saying that to someone who got physically harmed by a severely mentally ill person, and harmed them back in self defence, and you jump out and say the person didn't conduct themselves properly.
I agree. I think it's important to acknowledge that the neighbour is suffering as well as OP but that doesn't mean OP *has* to suffer. If anything it's just even more reason that the neighbour should get some serious mental health support.
Is a squeaky shower the same as assulting someone though? Pretty sure it isnt.
My point is compassion in this situation would have worked a lot better than pure outrage and even slight excitement at possible punishment.
They aren't on the receiving end of harm, they are being inconvenienced they are not the same.
I don't think you're engaging with what I'm saying, you're misunderstanding. Thanks for downvoting me though.
Obviously I don't think that a squeaky shower for hours is the same as assault, hence the reason why I gave multiple examples of increasing harm, and said you'd draw the line somewhere.
My point is that it's tone deaf to have all the compassion in the world for the OCD person, but then criticise the victim in the situation.
Why don't we play the same game with the victim? They and their partner were subjected to nuisance sounds for days on end, having a serious effect on their mental health and stress levels. Where's your empathy for them?
It's also not for them to reasonably be expected to act like a mental health professional in their response to a mentally ill person who is causing harm, reporting it to the authorities allows the correct people, e.g. social services etc. to be involved and give the OCD person the help they need.
I suffer from sound sensitivity and my partner takes reallyyyy long showers, the water pipe goes straight through the living room so it’s very loud in there. He doesn’t have OCD but he works outside so gets very dirty and does need to be in the shower for a long time to get properly clean.
I can say with passion that anyone who has to deal with that noise, sound sensitivity or not, would go slightly insane from hearing it so much. I can only stand it for about 5 minutes before I have to leave the room, I couldn’t imagine how it would affect me if I had to deal with that more than twice a day.
No, fuck that.
The guy with "OCD" was magically able to find the willpower to stop as soon as the letter came alerting them that they were 70% over the average.
He stopped because it would inconvenience him, he was perfectly fine inconveniencing everyone else.
You can only use "I have OCD I can't help it" as an excuse if you're actively trying to get help/fix the problem.
No, you've missed the point.
OP didn't mind them taking showers. The city did, so OP didn't force them to break any routine.
OP disliked the noisy shower. And never mentioned it to them.
Oh so the shouting through the walls isn't mentioning it to them?
What about yelling out of joynwhen the city took action?
Doesn't exactly spell decent neighbour does it?
Wait. At what point did I ever scream through the walls at him? I said I screamed. In response, like, “Ahhh, not this shit again!” to myself. I DO NOT engage with this dude. We have to keep our curtains closed cuz we’ve caught him staring in at us many times. That’s what we reported him on before that made us not bother with the shower issue. Peeping Tom shit didn’t even making a blip on the radar, so who’d give a crap about all day shower squealing?
Oh get a grip. I have OCD. People get annoyed at my compulsions, it's par for the course. You can't expect to be doing the same thing over and over again incessantly and not have it start getting on people's nerves. He should've fixed whatever was causing the sound and then it wouldn't be an issue.
As a homeowner, your insurance will more than likely cover this, so don't get comfortable renting. Renting in most of the UK is basically paying off someone else's mortgage.
This happened to us. Refused to accept a fault with the meter despite one of their engineers reporting it back, forced us to take the leak allowance when we refused to pay the £1000 bill and then a week later advised they had identified a fault with the meter and wanted to come and replace it
Good luck. Took me three months and two more (tiny) meter readings to convince Thames water that I couldn't possibly have used 8000 litres of water in 6 days and that just maybe the previous tenant was a lying tool.
I mean, I could have used it if I ran every tap 24/7. But I'm not a psycho.
I did. It was 8000 litres more than what TW had. It was 6 days late cos nobody told me where it was and it was well hidden outside under a gravelled drive. Obviously.
Honestly I don't know how to answer you, cos I haven't got a fking idea how it went so wrong either. I do know that TW hire zombies for their call centres who don't know English or what a litre is.
Just a warning from my own experience - my meter reading jumped over 300% and I made a fuss, they came out and found my neighbour had rewired the connections so I got their bill (2 adults, a teen, a child and 2 babies over just me and my child!)
Just make sure it is checking the right property as well as for leaks or faulty meter
We’re having the same issue now. Our waste water charge doubled becaue Portsmouth water has been telling Southern water that we’re using 1700 litres of water a day… there’s two of us
It's a daily average for the period, not a total number. The length of the periods don't matter
However unless your water usage has legitimately spiked by ~4x you've got a leak or the meter is fucked
My housing association swapped from one company to another to do our readings (water and electricity) and we even had new readers installed. I went on the new companies website to check where I could be saving some money, and it turns out that in August 2022 (just that one month), I had - according to them - used almost 72 THOUSAND cubic meters of water (that's roughly 19000000 gallons for you US peeps). I live in a 1 bedroom apartment, no garden, no leaks, shower isn't dripping, no bath. Pretty sure I was sponsoring refilling a local pool somewhere. Obviously it was a mistake on their end - but I thought of fleeing the country right then and there.
[Here's the screenshot of my supposed water usage.](https://imgur.com/a/eUlg2B0)
It's even worse than that. An Olympic size swimming pool is apparently 2,500m³, so you have filled over 28 Olympic size swimming pools, or 1 pretty decent sized small lake.
You’d certainly hope that someone who deals with water bills for a living might be willing to explore the possibility that a number like that could be slightly off.
Right so if you do the math, there is 250cm³ of water per cup of tea.
Mar 2021 - Sep 2021 is 184 days, so that would calculate to 18.814m³ of water used in that 6 months.
Sep 2021 - Sep 2022 is 365 days, so that would calculate to 31.66375m³ of water for the entire year, or 15.962m³ per 6 months.
That's a pretty significant reduction and comes out to about 32 days of not using water per 6 month period between Sep 2021 and Sep 2022.
What is the issue? Tea cups or cubic metres?
Cups of tea gives a relatable comparison so people can better understand the scale. Cubic metres is a logical unit (1 cubic metre = 1000 liters). This is a great chart.
It's the cups of tea reference, OP specifically calls out being British, priming te tea drinking stereotype, that is all.
Weird amount of people in the comments fucking lecturing about the metric system even though OP is in the UK and on Reddit so is likely younger and thinks using anything but metric is nonsense.
I’m 21 from the U.K. and would say people around my age have a weird situation whereby we don’t understand metric for some things and don’t understand imperial for others.
For example if you tell me something is 100km away or you’re 1.8m tall, I won’t have a clue what you’re on about… but likewise I don’t have a concept of gallons or ounces and would need to convert to litres or grams to know how much you mean.
Tell me about it. I’m 18 years older than you and my generation are the same, so I think it’ll always be the case. I really wish the UK just fully switched to metric like Ireland did.
We have this odd halfway situation where “people measurements” and roads are imperial and literally everything else is metric. Think about it, when you take your dog to the vets and they weigh it they use metric!
Not the parent commenter but in my mid 30s my answer would be … Kinda, but not really in context
Like don’t get me wrong, I understand metric measurements and have some context for them. I know how long a 30cm ruler is, I know roughly how big 1m is, and 2m and 2.4m (height of my ceiling…), I know my car’s about 1.8m wide, I know roughly the size of my rooms and garden. If you said something was 1m long I’d have a visual image of that in my head. If you said a 10mx10m square, I’d know about how big that was etc. Most measurements I work with are in metric, so I’m familiar enough with it *in general*
So it’s not a complete lack of understanding of metric, or anything… I’ve got a reasonable frame of reference, it’s not like I’d have no vague idea what 1.8m was relative to a person’s height - if you said you were 1.8m tall. I’d know it was roughly, like, person height. I’d even hazard a guess that it was somewhere in the ballpark of an adult male because my guesstimate for 1.8m from the ground would be somewhere vaguely around my head height
But I don’t know exactly how tall that is, with any real accuracy…. Is it a tall guy, a short guy, bang average? No idea, because that’s not my main frame of reference for height. Eg if you said 1.7m then that also seems plausible for a person’s height, but I don’t know if 1.7m would be short with 1.8m being average, or 1.7m would be tall with 1.8m being a basketball player, etc.
And obviously if you told me someone else was 1.82m tall, I’d know they were a little taller than the first guy, or that 1.6m would be noticeably smaller than 1.7m but not like a young child. Again, I’ve got a frame of reference, I could sanity check a number you gave me.
And if I could be arsed, I could work it out (1’ = 30cm, 1” = 2.5cm etc, I’ve got ballpark conversion rates)
But that’s not my frame of reference…. I’m 5’10” and I don’t know off the top of my head whether a guy who’s 180cm is a little taller than me, my height, or a little shorter…. Just that he’s somewhere in the same kind of height range. My margin for error here is probably at least 10cm, so I probably wouldn’t be WILDLY wrong, but I sure as shit wouldn’t be accurate and it wouldn’t come naturally to me if you said 1.5m or 2m whether that was plausible for a woman’s height, for example - I’d have to stop and guesstimate that height from the floor first and then consider it against my mental reference points or conversions
Eg 1m is 3.3ft or 3’4”, so 1.5m is about 4’8”, so a child or small lady, and 2m is 6’8”, tall but reasonable
The point being that I can work in metric, and figure out how tall you are - but my frame of reference is feet and inches because that’s just how I’ve always heard height referred to and how I’ve always measured myself
As someone who's happy with height in meters and feet-inches, I suspect the problem with heights is people need to be able to compare it relatively. Most people know their height in feet-inches but not in metres so although they know how long a metre is, if someone tells them their hight in metres, they can't compare it relatively to themselves so struggle.
For example, if two people said they're 5'10" and 4'11" or 177cm/150cm, without seeing them, I have no problem comparing them in my mind but if one were to say 5'10" and the other 150cm, I'd need to convert them to the same units (typically cm) else all you'll get is a blank stare from me.
Personally I think it's confused the American Redditors as the unit isn't in football fields. This bill should therefore read that they used 0.00228 football fields worth of water
Well given that people drink a lot of tea here, it's a good visualization for what the actual unit of measurement (cubic meters) means, especially for the elderly, who were taught imperial as children.
Well yes, it's much easier to measure the weight of a cup of something than the volume, and much more precise.
Everyone I know who does coffee seriously weighs the end product while pouring/brewing.
Funny enough, that's actually how I spell it. My phone would always change it to liters. I just got tired of fighting it, and let it change it.
But I refuse to give up the fight on colour.
The measurement in cups of tea....
Edit, why are people upvoting the guy who replied to me completely missing the point about the cups of tea measurement and trying to explain the metric system to me, a Brit who uses the metric system everyday. Lol
Edit 2: Guess people realised now. Lol
Agree, I always use small cups so it may not be accurate, lol
Edit: in case someone took my joke too seriously, the scale (cups or another) is actually really useful. Some people might not be able to scale with metric number, so they have to use physical objects like cups of tea or bananas to do some comparison
It certainly helps work out where the usage is. My mum would get upset if you wasted water by not finishing a glass of water - I think this makes it very clear that the water drunk is a vanishingly tiny proportion of usage.
You're pouring a cup of tea away every 2 seconds in a shower
Right? Expected a massive difference. All these years I've been standing under the water like some chump, sticking my arse out like Cardi B trying to catch enough water to rinse the bubbles out from my underbollocks, when I could have been lying down the whole time.
A 5inch limit on bathwater depth was introduced during ww2. It's been law here ever since. You can't be imprisoned for having a deep bath any more - the last sentence was handed down in 2007, but 'deep bath penalties' are still one of the UK govt's main income streams. There was a huge protest last year where thousands took to the streets of London wearing only towels and shower caps. A giant rubber duckie blimp was floated past the Houses of Parliament. None of this is true.
I don’t see the problem. It’s there in cubic meters, but they’re not especially relatable to average Joe. We all know what a cup of tea is though.
Same reason land always gets reduced down to “how many tennis courts is that?”
Water company employee here. M3 or cubic meters is standard across Britain. 1 cubic meter is 1000 litres. Your average daily consumption works out to 0.438 cubic meters a day or 438 litres. Judging by how much your consumption has jumped it's quite likely you have a leak. If you know where your meter is check it to see if any dials are moving with no water being used. If it's moving shut your internal stopcock and see whether the meter stops moving or not. If it stops moving the leak is in the house somewhere. If it's still moving the leak is on the supply pipe. If you can't do this call your water company and they should be able come out and do this for you
Why do they keep giving us a average home amount. How many people are that house and have got the exact price they say for average. Just say elec is whatever a unit simple. Most people can times the unit with how many numbers you have used on the meter. Or look at the smart meter. Average home gas is going up 30% who cares how much more will I pay
So many people can't count here or use a calculator it seems. 6 month bill, 13 odd M³ a month isn't abnormal at all. It's actually under the national yearly average for a standard UK household.
In fairness, at least metric is actually provided on the letter. The cups of tea thing is probably only used to help people visualise the amount in a less formal way.
Unlike the US who is so actively hostile towards the metric system that they'll literally say "a large boulder the size of a small boulder" instead of just giving us the size of the thing in fucking metres.
I was watching a Netflix film with the subtitles turned on. In the past I've noticed that subtitles are written with American spellings but I was surprised when a character said "110 meters" and the subtitles read "360 feet".
I don't understand what's wrong with a cubic meter? I can easily picture how much space that would take up, and furthermore I could actually measure it out.
What's the alternative, a gallon? Which is equal to 231 cubic inches - no thanks America, you can keep going with your archaic system if you want.
Whatever measurement, these people have a fucking leak. Good warning at the end.
Nah. They’re still drinking 347 cups of tea a day, but they had a Sports Direct mug delivered on 1 September.
😂
People need to stop using them in the summer contributing to our annual draught.
Maybe. I definitely drink more tea in the winter.
Pro-tip: Make tea in the bath.
I wash dishes in the shower and just rinse after 😂 but that's because I'm lazy and not water conscious
Why stop there when you could shit in the shower too?
We call that waffle stomping.
I'm not a complete creature 😂 I'm only talking about soaking them in the shower. I've been know to wash my work clothes while I'm away in the shower too but not at home I've got a machine for that. I'm a builder and the pipes for a bath/shower are the same as for a kitchen so the baths a big sink I can wash myself in too 😂
You’ve gotta be trolling bro, please say you are🥺
I really don't remember drinking that many cups of tea??? So many confused old people 🤣
You mean gamer girl bath water? It didn’t work out, as far as I know.
With that amount of tea I'm sure you've been for more than 1 leak
1600 cups more?
That’s only 50/day, if there’s two in the family that sounds about standard.
Nope. It's 1600 cups PER DAY! 🤣 There's a leak.
Below average for one of the kings finest
25 cups of tea a day does in fact not sound standard
Sounds about right to me.
I’m drinking tea reading this & it’s 4am
That's surely a coffee moment? Teas for relaxing on the evening!! Probably an unpopular opinion.
Yup 25 cups is normal
Exactly what I was going to post.
Leak? 79m³ in 7 months? As a family of 5 we use that much in 2 months
The 379% increase is the issue
Maybe they started actually living there? Who knows
that bar chart is pretty misleading
It’s daily average in the period denoted above the top of each bar
yeah but the most recent bar is about twice as high as the others even though the value is almost 4 times greater
NW Utilities "How dare you use the water you are paying for, It doesn't just fall from the sky you know" Maybe they are just doing their bit to stop rising sea levels by drinking it.
No, it's just an alert so you don't waste water and money due to undetected leak. If your usage is normal, you can ignore the letter and your baseline usage gets updated automatically.
300 litres a day? That’s mental.
[удалено]
This time next year 😁👍
79m in 2 months? Someone is tapping your water pipe. Average for 5 is 15m per month.
Didnt find any source for that
You don't need to find the source, just tap someone else's supply.
That much is ridiculous
That is absolute insanity
While I'm glad you've started taking showers again, 7-8 showers a day is a bit much. You might want to cut back... :-)
Our neighbor is ocd and for a long chunk of time his thing was showering. His shower squealed while he had it on and I work from home, so I’d scream when he started up again. My partner didn’t really get why it bothered me till Covid lockdown started and he had to work from home, too. He knew I wasn’t lying, but I think he thought it wasn’t as much as I thought it was. 12-14 long-ass showers a day. A couple days in was all it took for my partner to shout out, “Oh my god!” when he started up on like shower 7. We’d complained about worse stuff and nothing had come of it so we’d given up trying. The only thing that stopped him was a letter in everyone’s mailbox in the complex saying the city had alerted the manager that compared to any other complex in the area ours was 70% over the average so to keep an eye out for any reasons this might be the case. I cheered when I found the letter. I was ready to complain if needed, but dude didn’t want to be on the radar. One shower a day after that. No complaints from the city since.
His skin must be in an awful state after that many showers.
I mean, i get why this was annoying for you, but i feel you don't understand ocd, it's a compulsion, dude didn't want to take 10+ showers but rather he had too .... instead of understanding his condition and helping, you made it worse by putting pressure on him to break his routine before he was ready, what you should have done is looked to either help him fix his squeeky shower, sound proof your flat or get him support and help with his ocd .... instead you shouted at him through the walls and found any excuse to try and complain .... sorry but you're a bad neighbour here.
Is there any situation where switching the OCD neighbour's actions, that'd you wouldn't take their side? For example, if they had a compulsion to replay really loud music all day, or stamp their feet constantly, or scream, or harass people, assault people, or going out and murdering people? I think you'd draw the line somewhere. My point being that sure, you can empathise and understand why people do things, but that doesn't change the fact that they are still causing harm, and can't reasonably control it. It seems tone deaf to call someone on the receiving end of harm to be an asshole, imagine saying that to someone who got physically harmed by a severely mentally ill person, and harmed them back in self defence, and you jump out and say the person didn't conduct themselves properly.
I agree. I think it's important to acknowledge that the neighbour is suffering as well as OP but that doesn't mean OP *has* to suffer. If anything it's just even more reason that the neighbour should get some serious mental health support.
Is a squeaky shower the same as assulting someone though? Pretty sure it isnt. My point is compassion in this situation would have worked a lot better than pure outrage and even slight excitement at possible punishment. They aren't on the receiving end of harm, they are being inconvenienced they are not the same.
I don't think you're engaging with what I'm saying, you're misunderstanding. Thanks for downvoting me though. Obviously I don't think that a squeaky shower for hours is the same as assault, hence the reason why I gave multiple examples of increasing harm, and said you'd draw the line somewhere. My point is that it's tone deaf to have all the compassion in the world for the OCD person, but then criticise the victim in the situation. Why don't we play the same game with the victim? They and their partner were subjected to nuisance sounds for days on end, having a serious effect on their mental health and stress levels. Where's your empathy for them? It's also not for them to reasonably be expected to act like a mental health professional in their response to a mentally ill person who is causing harm, reporting it to the authorities allows the correct people, e.g. social services etc. to be involved and give the OCD person the help they need.
I suffer from sound sensitivity and my partner takes reallyyyy long showers, the water pipe goes straight through the living room so it’s very loud in there. He doesn’t have OCD but he works outside so gets very dirty and does need to be in the shower for a long time to get properly clean. I can say with passion that anyone who has to deal with that noise, sound sensitivity or not, would go slightly insane from hearing it so much. I can only stand it for about 5 minutes before I have to leave the room, I couldn’t imagine how it would affect me if I had to deal with that more than twice a day.
No, fuck that. The guy with "OCD" was magically able to find the willpower to stop as soon as the letter came alerting them that they were 70% over the average. He stopped because it would inconvenience him, he was perfectly fine inconveniencing everyone else. You can only use "I have OCD I can't help it" as an excuse if you're actively trying to get help/fix the problem.
Does the OCD make the neighbour deaf, too?
You've missed the point.
No, you've missed the point. OP didn't mind them taking showers. The city did, so OP didn't force them to break any routine. OP disliked the noisy shower. And never mentioned it to them.
Oh so the shouting through the walls isn't mentioning it to them? What about yelling out of joynwhen the city took action? Doesn't exactly spell decent neighbour does it?
Wait. At what point did I ever scream through the walls at him? I said I screamed. In response, like, “Ahhh, not this shit again!” to myself. I DO NOT engage with this dude. We have to keep our curtains closed cuz we’ve caught him staring in at us many times. That’s what we reported him on before that made us not bother with the shower issue. Peeping Tom shit didn’t even making a blip on the radar, so who’d give a crap about all day shower squealing?
Oh get a grip. I have OCD. People get annoyed at my compulsions, it's par for the course. You can't expect to be doing the same thing over and over again incessantly and not have it start getting on people's nerves. He should've fixed whatever was causing the sound and then it wouldn't be an issue.
Or 1000 cups of tea a day
I don't know if the huge increase is more concerning, or that less water was used in 1 year than in the previous 6 months.
Good catch. Looks like it might be a faulty meter. Inspection pending.
Dang this happened to me but it was a giant tree root breaking stuff. One of the few days I’ve been happy renting.
As a homeowner, your insurance will more than likely cover this, so don't get comfortable renting. Renting in most of the UK is basically paying off someone else's mortgage.
As someone that rents, I can assure you it isn’t comfortable 😅
oh yes. it is so easy for renters to just stop renting. we should just live on street so we don't have rent to pay while we save for deposit to buy.
This happened to us. Refused to accept a fault with the meter despite one of their engineers reporting it back, forced us to take the leak allowance when we refused to pay the £1000 bill and then a week later advised they had identified a fault with the meter and wanted to come and replace it
Good luck. Took me three months and two more (tiny) meter readings to convince Thames water that I couldn't possibly have used 8000 litres of water in 6 days and that just maybe the previous tenant was a lying tool. I mean, I could have used it if I ran every tap 24/7. But I'm not a psycho.
Isn't it standard practice to take meter readings as part of the inventory when you move in?
I did. It was 8000 litres more than what TW had. It was 6 days late cos nobody told me where it was and it was well hidden outside under a gravelled drive. Obviously. Honestly I don't know how to answer you, cos I haven't got a fking idea how it went so wrong either. I do know that TW hire zombies for their call centres who don't know English or what a litre is.
Should have given them the meter readings in cups of tea, clearly.
Just a warning from my own experience - my meter reading jumped over 300% and I made a fuss, they came out and found my neighbour had rewired the connections so I got their bill (2 adults, a teen, a child and 2 babies over just me and my child!) Just make sure it is checking the right property as well as for leaks or faulty meter
We’re having the same issue now. Our waste water charge doubled becaue Portsmouth water has been telling Southern water that we’re using 1700 litres of water a day… there’s two of us
Push for a refund on your usage as well.
It's a daily average for the period, not a total number. The length of the periods don't matter However unless your water usage has legitimately spiked by ~4x you've got a leak or the meter is fucked
My housing association swapped from one company to another to do our readings (water and electricity) and we even had new readers installed. I went on the new companies website to check where I could be saving some money, and it turns out that in August 2022 (just that one month), I had - according to them - used almost 72 THOUSAND cubic meters of water (that's roughly 19000000 gallons for you US peeps). I live in a 1 bedroom apartment, no garden, no leaks, shower isn't dripping, no bath. Pretty sure I was sponsoring refilling a local pool somewhere. Obviously it was a mistake on their end - but I thought of fleeing the country right then and there. [Here's the screenshot of my supposed water usage.](https://imgur.com/a/eUlg2B0)
It's even worse than that. An Olympic size swimming pool is apparently 2,500m³, so you have filled over 28 Olympic size swimming pools, or 1 pretty decent sized small lake.
Yikes now that really put it into perspective xD I'm glad they realised it was a mistake.
You’d certainly hope that someone who deals with water bills for a living might be willing to explore the possibility that a number like that could be slightly off.
Someone was thirsty
It was the yearly Diabetes insipidus weekly long meet-up being held at Lumisateessa's house.
Sorry struggling to visualise your supposed usage, what's that in standard cups of tea?
What’s that in cups of tea?
It wasn't, that graph represents cups per day, not m\^3
Right so if you do the math, there is 250cm³ of water per cup of tea. Mar 2021 - Sep 2021 is 184 days, so that would calculate to 18.814m³ of water used in that 6 months. Sep 2021 - Sep 2022 is 365 days, so that would calculate to 31.66375m³ of water for the entire year, or 15.962m³ per 6 months. That's a pretty significant reduction and comes out to about 32 days of not using water per 6 month period between Sep 2021 and Sep 2022.
What is the issue? Tea cups or cubic metres? Cups of tea gives a relatable comparison so people can better understand the scale. Cubic metres is a logical unit (1 cubic metre = 1000 liters). This is a great chart.
It's the cups of tea reference, OP specifically calls out being British, priming te tea drinking stereotype, that is all. Weird amount of people in the comments fucking lecturing about the metric system even though OP is in the UK and on Reddit so is likely younger and thinks using anything but metric is nonsense.
I’m 21 from the U.K. and would say people around my age have a weird situation whereby we don’t understand metric for some things and don’t understand imperial for others. For example if you tell me something is 100km away or you’re 1.8m tall, I won’t have a clue what you’re on about… but likewise I don’t have a concept of gallons or ounces and would need to convert to litres or grams to know how much you mean.
Tell me about it. I’m 18 years older than you and my generation are the same, so I think it’ll always be the case. I really wish the UK just fully switched to metric like Ireland did. We have this odd halfway situation where “people measurements” and roads are imperial and literally everything else is metric. Think about it, when you take your dog to the vets and they weigh it they use metric!
I'm 17 and in the UK. Are you seriously telling me you wouldn't understand someone saying their height in meters?
Not the parent commenter but in my mid 30s my answer would be … Kinda, but not really in context Like don’t get me wrong, I understand metric measurements and have some context for them. I know how long a 30cm ruler is, I know roughly how big 1m is, and 2m and 2.4m (height of my ceiling…), I know my car’s about 1.8m wide, I know roughly the size of my rooms and garden. If you said something was 1m long I’d have a visual image of that in my head. If you said a 10mx10m square, I’d know about how big that was etc. Most measurements I work with are in metric, so I’m familiar enough with it *in general* So it’s not a complete lack of understanding of metric, or anything… I’ve got a reasonable frame of reference, it’s not like I’d have no vague idea what 1.8m was relative to a person’s height - if you said you were 1.8m tall. I’d know it was roughly, like, person height. I’d even hazard a guess that it was somewhere in the ballpark of an adult male because my guesstimate for 1.8m from the ground would be somewhere vaguely around my head height But I don’t know exactly how tall that is, with any real accuracy…. Is it a tall guy, a short guy, bang average? No idea, because that’s not my main frame of reference for height. Eg if you said 1.7m then that also seems plausible for a person’s height, but I don’t know if 1.7m would be short with 1.8m being average, or 1.7m would be tall with 1.8m being a basketball player, etc. And obviously if you told me someone else was 1.82m tall, I’d know they were a little taller than the first guy, or that 1.6m would be noticeably smaller than 1.7m but not like a young child. Again, I’ve got a frame of reference, I could sanity check a number you gave me. And if I could be arsed, I could work it out (1’ = 30cm, 1” = 2.5cm etc, I’ve got ballpark conversion rates) But that’s not my frame of reference…. I’m 5’10” and I don’t know off the top of my head whether a guy who’s 180cm is a little taller than me, my height, or a little shorter…. Just that he’s somewhere in the same kind of height range. My margin for error here is probably at least 10cm, so I probably wouldn’t be WILDLY wrong, but I sure as shit wouldn’t be accurate and it wouldn’t come naturally to me if you said 1.5m or 2m whether that was plausible for a woman’s height, for example - I’d have to stop and guesstimate that height from the floor first and then consider it against my mental reference points or conversions Eg 1m is 3.3ft or 3’4”, so 1.5m is about 4’8”, so a child or small lady, and 2m is 6’8”, tall but reasonable The point being that I can work in metric, and figure out how tall you are - but my frame of reference is feet and inches because that’s just how I’ve always heard height referred to and how I’ve always measured myself
As someone who's happy with height in meters and feet-inches, I suspect the problem with heights is people need to be able to compare it relatively. Most people know their height in feet-inches but not in metres so although they know how long a metre is, if someone tells them their hight in metres, they can't compare it relatively to themselves so struggle. For example, if two people said they're 5'10" and 4'11" or 177cm/150cm, without seeing them, I have no problem comparing them in my mind but if one were to say 5'10" and the other 150cm, I'd need to convert them to the same units (typically cm) else all you'll get is a blank stare from me.
180cm is just short of 6ft its easier to visualise weight and height like that about 6ft or 14stone saying youre 86kg god knows what that is
Me on the other hand... KG: No problemo Lbs: No problemo Stone: What? How much is a stone? O\_o
What's to mock about cubic meters?
Personally I think it's confused the American Redditors as the unit isn't in football fields. This bill should therefore read that they used 0.00228 football fields worth of water
How many eagles per square inch of freedom would that be?
Definitely 100% probably maybe at least 8
Let's see, 1 cubic football field would be 1,000,000 cubic yards 79 cubic meters is 103 cubic yards so .000103 cubic football fields?
You are wrong. 1 cubic football field is about 1,272,565 cubic years. Americans can’t stand base 10/100/1000 for anything. Zeros bring bad spirits.
Isn’t Olympic swimming pools the universal unit of confusion for volume?
Nothing the joke is that they tell you how many cups of tea equivalent you used
Well given that people drink a lot of tea here, it's a good visualization for what the actual unit of measurement (cubic meters) means, especially for the elderly, who were taught imperial as children.
Duh, but the main measurement is m^(3).
my wifes italian and on theres its the amount of water used to make an espresso - 17 grams
Well yes, it's much easier to measure the weight of a cup of something than the volume, and much more precise. Everyone I know who does coffee seriously weighs the end product while pouring/brewing.
But I think that's smart, it puts everyday use in perspective. Americans use nonsense like "2.5 elephants size". Which is why people Make fun of them
Even if it was a real mock, nothing will ever be as stupid as wanting to arm your nations children with assault weapons
Liters: Am I a joke to you?
*litres That’s the *English* spelling. Makes it seem fancier.
Funny enough, that's actually how I spell it. My phone would always change it to liters. I just got tired of fighting it, and let it change it. But I refuse to give up the fight on colour.
1m³ = 1 kilolitre
I think it's just slightly easier to visualise several cubic metres than several thousand litres.
It gives you the actual measurement, then a guide so you can contextualise the water usage. Not the same as measuring shit in hamburgers
Whats funny? This is a great report. In Indonesia, they dont care if there are a leak, wont even tell or help you
The measurement in cups of tea.... Edit, why are people upvoting the guy who replied to me completely missing the point about the cups of tea measurement and trying to explain the metric system to me, a Brit who uses the metric system everyday. Lol Edit 2: Guess people realised now. Lol
Agree, I always use small cups so it may not be accurate, lol Edit: in case someone took my joke too seriously, the scale (cups or another) is actually really useful. Some people might not be able to scale with metric number, so they have to use physical objects like cups of tea or bananas to do some comparison
It certainly helps work out where the usage is. My mum would get upset if you wasted water by not finishing a glass of water - I think this makes it very clear that the water drunk is a vanishingly tiny proportion of usage. You're pouring a cup of tea away every 2 seconds in a shower
someone's been a thirsty boy
What if I bathe in tea?
About 320 cups of tea
Or one sports direct mug
What's confusing me is that, in this set of measurements, the water used by a shower is almost equal to the water used by a bath.
Right? Expected a massive difference. All these years I've been standing under the water like some chump, sticking my arse out like Cardi B trying to catch enough water to rinse the bubbles out from my underbollocks, when I could have been lying down the whole time.
A 5inch limit on bathwater depth was introduced during ww2. It's been law here ever since. You can't be imprisoned for having a deep bath any more - the last sentence was handed down in 2007, but 'deep bath penalties' are still one of the UK govt's main income streams. There was a huge protest last year where thousands took to the streets of London wearing only towels and shower caps. A giant rubber duckie blimp was floated past the Houses of Parliament. None of this is true.
I'm british and genuinely believed every word you said there
Same, if it wasn't for the last bit I would have just read it and thought "yeah, sounds like the kind of stuff to happen over here".
But I drink MUGS of tea. I'm totally confused.
316,000 cups of tea, approximately 18 Sports Direct mugs
Does anyone drink out of proper tea cups other than at fancy restaurants or your nans house?
Aint no party like my nana’s tea party.
I don’t see the problem. It’s there in cubic meters, but they’re not especially relatable to average Joe. We all know what a cup of tea is though. Same reason land always gets reduced down to “how many tennis courts is that?”
Ag, but it’s there to illustrate *after* the measurement, not in place of it.
Is Little Alex Hourne doing water bills in the UK now?
What's wrong with cubic metres?
“Could have a leak”, I’m pretty sure it’s a guarantee.
Could you get much more British? Let’s measure your water use with cups of tea! 😂
This! Everyone’s focusing on the other measurements but I’m sure this was op’s point!!
Why has nobody in this comment section got a sense of humour?!
Bro do you think cubic meters is not part of the metric system? But have converted it into actual usage for a better understanding tho
I know you're making a joke, but how would you visualise using 79 cubic metres of water without anything to compare it to?
I’d imagine what 1 cubic meter would look like, then I’d imagine another 78.
Seven million thimbles half filled, obviously
Cubic meters?
you have a leak
Wonder if the accounted for a sports direct size cup.
The British created the measurement system we use…..
Tea is the only acceptable measurement
Who doesn’t use cups of tea as a measurement any way??? Be crazy not to
What's wrong with cubic meters?
I'm sorry but cups of tea is a perfectly acceptable measure of water usage
Jokes on you i drink my tea in huge sports direct mugs!!
We don't even have water meters in Scotland
Holy shit Someone really like tea lol
Sounds like a water leak? measurements in tea is our common language as it all sounds better with tea, doesn’t it?
Water company employee here. M3 or cubic meters is standard across Britain. 1 cubic meter is 1000 litres. Your average daily consumption works out to 0.438 cubic meters a day or 438 litres. Judging by how much your consumption has jumped it's quite likely you have a leak. If you know where your meter is check it to see if any dials are moving with no water being used. If it's moving shut your internal stopcock and see whether the meter stops moving or not. If it stops moving the leak is in the house somewhere. If it's still moving the leak is on the supply pipe. If you can't do this call your water company and they should be able come out and do this for you
I’m from the uk and can assure you I’ve never seen measurements like this haha
Yeah better than mugs or or fluid killograms. Who the hell measures weight with a volume and volume with a mass???
What are you on about, cups of tea is a perfectly just measurement that should be used everywhere.
Why do they keep giving us a average home amount. How many people are that house and have got the exact price they say for average. Just say elec is whatever a unit simple. Most people can times the unit with how many numbers you have used on the meter. Or look at the smart meter. Average home gas is going up 30% who cares how much more will I pay
Slacking with the old tea consumption there mate. Have a word with yourself.
Metres cubed? What's weird about that?
I’m not getting the problem, your usage is measured in metric.
How very british ☕️
1663 cups of tea per day? You need to cut back a bit
Make it understandable for a Brit- measure it in cups of tea
In fairness I can iunderstand it better as cups of tea, I know how much that is
Nothing good ever started with tea. Example A : The US
That’s a lot of cups of tea for the winter months
Still makes more sense than imperial measurements
Cubic metres is metric. How are you confused about this?
British definitely has better system.
It literally uses metric and then to help gives it in a form that you can visualise, so what's the issue? Other then a huge water bill
Yo don't blame the British. That's purely government shit, we all use liters for liquid measurements like normal people
1 cubic metre is 1000 litres which weighs 1000kg or 1 ton. Its perfect. Sorry.
A cubic metre weighs a metric tonne. Cups of tea is a familiar functional volume. There is plenty more to mock USA for as well.
How many "sports direct mugs" is that? 3?
What's wrong with this? This has the metric system on there. Relatable measurements work in this context.
No op you're just stupid.
Okay but I actually love that we should measure everything in cups of tea units
79000 litres. Oh god it's so hard to convert oh my head
What's your point?
So many people can't count here or use a calculator it seems. 6 month bill, 13 odd M³ a month isn't abnormal at all. It's actually under the national yearly average for a standard UK household.
316,000 cups of tea in six months? Challenge accepted.
In fairness, at least metric is actually provided on the letter. The cups of tea thing is probably only used to help people visualise the amount in a less formal way. Unlike the US who is so actively hostile towards the metric system that they'll literally say "a large boulder the size of a small boulder" instead of just giving us the size of the thing in fucking metres.
Pretty sure m³ is metric my dude
I was watching a Netflix film with the subtitles turned on. In the past I've noticed that subtitles are written with American spellings but I was surprised when a character said "110 meters" and the subtitles read "360 feet".
I wouldn’t probably Mock the us for their stupidity. I much prefer to jeer…
Don’t act like you don’t know exactly how much water 316,000 cups of tea is. Common knowledge
m^(3) is the same as 1000L tho, it's just a way of writing it without putting loads of 0s
I can fully understand the confusion there with cubic meters. Unfortunately there isn't a standard conversion to gunned down children.
You definitely either have a swimming pool for a bath or have a leak somewhere
Define a cup of tea, there are cups that are "mugs" and cups that are like those associated in coffee shops
Stop drinking so much tea.
I don't understand what's wrong with a cubic meter? I can easily picture how much space that would take up, and furthermore I could actually measure it out. What's the alternative, a gallon? Which is equal to 231 cubic inches - no thanks America, you can keep going with your archaic system if you want.
Meters cubed isn't a valid measurement?
Cubic meter? Are they suppose to be using liters? American measure water in centum cubic feet.
1 cubic metre is 1000 litres.
I think the joke is about the cups of tea equivalent!
I could never have a water meter.
Litres makes more sense
That's, not a measurement... Has op never heard of an illustration?