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Do you have any idea how much you are paying for your water? One of the great embarrassments of strata living in this state is that most of us aren’t paying for the water we actually use.
Unless you have individual water meters, water will be charged to you in your levies on the basis of your unit entitlements rather than usage.
It means that lonely Ms Haversham in the sub-penthouse, who is environmentally aware and conserves water like a Supermax prisoner guards his food, could be paying five times as much for water as the couple and their couch-surfing mate in the studio on the ground floor (where the shower is their only refuge for ‘alone time’).
It’s even more of a sting if you are in a building with a centralised hot water system or, even worse, if you’re in a mixed commercial building with a cafe, hairdresser and launderette on the same system.
Apart from the inequity involved, this is a serious disincentive for water saving. Why should Ms H bother saving water if she’s paying for the rest of the building? Why would the mates in the studio care about how much hot water they use when they’re not charged for it?
And it’s not just the wasted water, there’s energy burned needlessly in pumping additional water to the upper floors of most buildings more than three storeys high.
Retrofitting individual meters is one answer although it could be costly and Sydney Water may complain about reading 120 meters instead of just one. By the way, individual meters benefit landlords because tenants pay for their water usage rather than landlords paying a share of the building’s.
I heard recently that an apartment block had been planned with one water meter, one electricity meter and one gas meter for the whole building – because it’s cheaper for the developers.
Government should force all new strata developments to have individual metering and offer real help to give the rest of us control over our water bills.
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