I already wrote a post about how Three Valleys Water randomly decided to remove our meter.

We’ve just had a bill through from them, with a meter reading that they took on the 28th August, billing us £82 for three months usage. That figure is utter crap, it’s way too high. Not to mention, there was no meter attached to our supply on the 28th August! That’s a day or two after I noticed that the meter had been removed.

They’ve put the bill on hold (just as well, because I was going to instruct my bank not to pay the Direct Debit) while they send an engineer out to see what’s happened, then when they get the report back they’ll “adjust the bill”. I can suggest a suitable adjustment – stick the thing up your fucking arse!

Our usage between 12/04/2007 and 25/05/07 was 7 cubic metres, costing 5.91. So, £5.91 over 43 days is 13.7p a day. Multiplying that by 95 days (between 25/05 and 28/08) gives a cost of £13.05.

They also change a “measured volume charge” which I believe is for sewerage. Between 12/04 and 25/05, that charge was £3.40, or 7.9p a day. Adding that to the previous calculations, it’s a total of 22p a day (rounding up), so the most usage charges we should expect is £20.52 – and I will not pay them any more than that.

I think the moral of the story is that I ought to take regular meter readings and record them – then I’d have discovered the missing meter a lot sooner. I may whip up a little webapp to record meter readings and do calculations + predictions of the next bill etc.