Unless you've been living with your head in the sand you'll have been hearing and seeing the ongoing fiasco that is Irish Water. It would be funny if it wasn't so tragic. Perhaps I'm just jealous I don't work for an organisation that appears to have a bonus scheme rewarding ineptitude.
But let me get back to the matter at hand, lets get down to the nitty gritty of it... How much is it going to cost me to wash my car now that we're paying for water?
The Irish Water website lists metered charges for water supplied at €2.44 per m³, (I'd link to the website only I'd be fearful that I'd somehow contribute to another nonsensical bonus for them hitting website traffic targets!). 1m³ = 1 cubic metre = 1,000 litres.
From looking online I'm taking the figure of 100 gallons for a 10 minute car wash using a standard garden hose. In new money that's 0.37m³ which totals 0.90cent. Ok so there's no need to smash open the piggy bank just yet!
So how often do you wash your car? Is it part of your weekend ritual? Once a week? Once a month? Well firstly lets take the once a week washer, that's 52 weeks of the year x .90cent = €46.80 so we'll call it €50 because lets be honest, sometimes it took you 11 minutes, and there was also that time you got distracted talking to your neighbour (bitching about water charges no less) and let the hose run, tut tut.
Then there's the once a month washer, so that's 12 x .90cent = €10.80, but that's not fair because you take 15 minutes to wash your car due to a build up of 4 weeks of motorway dirt on your car! So that's now 0.56m³ of water which costs €1.36 x 12 which is €16.39.
Then there's the rest of us, the ones that are either too lazy and too busy to wash our cars so we'll pay the €8-€10 in our local petrol station to get the car washed. I don't need to do the maths for you here to see that washing your own car at home may very well save you money in the long run and won't break the bank, but who has the time? Plus Irish weather is not a car washers friend.
There's lots of ways to be smarter about water usage now that we're being charged for it, the use of water butts collecting rain water, using a bucket and sponge to wash your car instead of the hose or using a hose with a nozzle that can stop the flow of water when it's not being used. MicksGarage would like to help you use water wisely so we have a number of cleaning products to help you on your way from buckets and sponges to waterless wash & wax
The views in this post are purely my own and do not reflect the views of MicksGarage. I also take no responsibility for the sums or equations therein, they are merely an estimate to satisfy our curiosity.
