Waterbutt payback

josip

We bought a water butt at the weekend.
A bargain at €24 I thought, until I did some sums.
During the growing season, we'd use maybe 2, 5 litre watering cans per day on plants and flowers.
So if the growing season is May -August, that's 120 * 10 = 1,200 litres of water.
I've heard figures of 0.2c/litre, so the watering can consumption would cost €2.40 per year from a tap.
So it will take 10 years to break even assuming the butt has water everytime we need it.
Our solar panels will achieve payback before that. Maybe.
Has anyone else calculated their payback for waterbutts?

zagmund

This is why I have a dislike of buying waterbutts - €24 for a piece of extruded plastic (OK, probably has a tap) seems a little OTT. It's like when I went to buy a litter tray for the cat a while back. They were charging €10 for a piece of plastic which even a €1 shop would have struggled to charge €1 for.

We have assorted water butts around the place, but they are mostly old bins. We also have a rainwater harvesting system for the roof water which went in during a refurb of the whole house. I'll admit that we didn't do the sums on it but it was something we wanted to put in anyway as a general sort of "doing our thing" thing. We also reckoned that being Ireland, the charge per litre was only ever going to go one way so it would end up paying for itself at some stage and after that (10, 15, whatever) it was all free water.

z

househero

+1 on the old bins


Saving over €250 a year by composting though!

josip

Did you buy diverters to connect the old bins to the downpipe?
Or are you using a traditional, "barrel at the end of the drainpipe" design?