Yes. The lunatics in the Irish Water asylum are planning on spending €Millions on re-branding.
Paragraphs-of-the-match:
"It has also been revealed Irish Water is to undergo a major re-brand in the coming months in order to restore its reputation."
I sense an issue with the understanding of the word "restore".
"The decision to re-brand Irish Water appears to be justified as 60pc of
people feel it should be abolished, according to the latest Sunday
Independent/MillwardBrown opinion poll."
Guys and gals, either or both of "re-branding" and "abolish" do not mean what you appear to think they mean.
This is the shower that spent €640,000 on a cartoon ad showing them laying mains pipes. They had to show it in cartoon form as they don't do it in reality much. They prefer to spend over €500 Million now installing water meters that won't come into use for billing until 2019. By this time most of them may need replacing.
They cause massive leaks when installing meters and then spend more money on ads claiming that they fixed the leaks. For one of the meter types, the householder can not see the last 2 digits of the reading.
Now they are planning to spend what is going to be many €Millions on re-branding.
Eircom re-branding as Eir apparently cost €16 Million
Here's a good new logo for free
Seriously Shirley.......
The organisation is dead. It is deceased. It's passed on. It's no more. It has ceased to be. It's expired and gone to meet its maker. This is a late organisation. It's a stiff. Bereft of life. It rests in peace.
It's rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-organisation.
Near the end of the original post (IrishWaterMistakes.blogspot.ie). I mentioned the Water Meter experience of a friend I was visiting at the Easter weekend.
In brief:
Irish Water installed a meter early February 2015
They left - but his water was still turned off. They had to come back to turn on the stopcock.
Later on he noticed his kitchen tap constantly dripping. Plumber - €50 - Grit washed in the supply from a careless meter installation had ended up preventing the tap washer from closing properly.
A weeks later he happened to be in his back garden and noticed a constant flow of water in the downpipe from his roof gutter. It wasn't raining. Plumber (after a week's wait) - €50 - Ballvalve in attic tank full of grit, etc.
He's down a total of €100
I was interested in seeing his meter and the workmanship of what could be seen.
Photos and description in the post below.
Apart from the poor workmanship, the cement spatter inside the box and the fact that the AMR unit hid the last 2 digits of the reading from view, I noticed something else.
If that meter had started off at a zero reading, then it was very high 2 months later. I felt that this was more than his leaking tap and ball valve would have accounted for. I made a note of the reading (less the last two invisible digits - obviously)
I rang him two weeks later and asked him to check the reading. It was clear from this new reading that he had an ongoing major leak somewhere.
He contacted Irish Water. It was June before they got back. He was sent a contract to sign. Eight pages or so of legalese intended to protect Irish Water's ass from everything.
I had advised him of the leak on April 21st. Until Irish Water came to investigate, he had the stress of wondering what sort of costs he might be exposed to if the leak was under his house. Even if the leak was under his garden, he had to wonder what sort of mess would be left behind by the First Fixers. The standard evident from the initial meter installation was not encouraging.
Along came an Irish Water contractor.
Yes. He had a leak. 8 litres per minute. Whoa!
His neighbour also had a leak. 6 litres per minute. Whoa again!
You see. This sort of thing is why the government and Irish Water keep banging on about the value of water meters. They won't be used for billing until 2019, but in the meantime they are discovering all these leaks.
Am I right? Am I right? We're talking multiple Olympic-sized swimming pools that could be filled by all these leaks in houses. Overall they estimate 6% to 7% of processed water is wasted via such leaks. This waste is not as high as the 50% leaking via the mains, but it's still quite a lot.
My friend's and his neighbour's leaks would not have been discovered had not those meters been installed.
.......Am I right? Am I right?
............... eh......... No...... not quite
Guess what?
My friend's leak was right at the meter - under the pavement - not even in his garden. His neighbour's leak was about a foot from the meter.
The contractor was a bit embarrassed. He grudgingly admitted that the process of back-filling the hole and tamping down the concrete could impose a lot of strain on the pipework and cause leaks.
Presumably he was really, really careful backfilling it this time around.
Brilliant.
Irish Water install meters and trigger massive leaks at some of them,
They then claim a success story. The meter has discovered a massive leak. We've all heard the propaganda. Yes it has - but the leak was caused by Irish Water.
Statistical?
I didn't go looking for that situation. I'm not a member of any activist group. I'm simply describing what I personally encountered by accident. The two particular leaks described above sort of looked for me :)
A third leak
I saw another one a few days ago close to where I live. It was clear that major leak was happening at the meter box. There was a digger, a truck, a jeep and traffic lights for a temporary 1-way traffic system at the location for an entire day.
This particular leak must have been at the supply side of the meter and stop valve. The guys were working in a fountain until they could manage to put in a new stop valve on the supply pipe.
The leak was absolutely at the meter position. When they packed up, the only sign of excacations was the new concrete around the box.
((Note added on October 7th:
Oh look! Four days later - there's a pool of water forming at the meter box. I suppose the digger, lorry and jeep + traffic lights will have to return for at least another day.
I suppose this would then make for 2 "fixed leaks" claimed by Irish Water.- for a leak that they caused in the first place and then did not fix properly when they got back to it.))
These are leaks that I just happened to become aware of. For whatever reason, I have not become aware of leaks further away from meters.
Three is not a significant sample. However ..... There is a systematic reason for large numbers of leaks to be at the meters rather than away from them.
The installion work appears to be sloppy and rushed. Consider this photo of a one particular meter box before backfill.
There are fourteen connections. All of these had to be tightened carefully with correct tension and avoiding strains on the pipe/joint meet - by someone on hands and knees reaching down - under pressure of time. Then the hole is backfilled and the surface banged smooth on top.
In the case above, that's 14 very potential leaks to be triggered by the imposed strains.
Some leaks might become apparent before the backfilling - which would be good - provided that they don't just backfill into the pool of water anyway.
Oh wait!
That amazing 'Lego' plumbing is clearly designed for unskilled labour who can't do any sort of pipe-bending.
Even so, we can see right-angle joints where the pipes are entering at a slight angle and under strain. This is the kiss of death for good joints - particularly when done by unskilled labout in a hurry.
'Lego'-style also adds to the cost of the material side of the installation. There are maybe 4 or 5 fittings per meter installation that would not need to be bought if they used pre-formed bends. Repeat the cost of that 2 million times.
Add the cost of the water leaking aferwards.
Add the cost of coming back to fix the really bad leaks.
Add the cost of water leaking that does not trigger the continuous flow alarm levels set for the meters. (No don't add that. Such leaks just go into the bill as consumption.)
Forget about the stress on householders informed about a leak and waiting for a resolution.
Apart from leaks at the meter connections, it is obvious that the process of digging and cutting imposes strains on the uncovered pipework - both on house and supply side.
There is a saying: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Irish Water break things near the things that they are 'fixing'.
The Universe is playing with our lives in strange ways
On October 5th, 2015, RTE did some more regurgitation of Irish Water spin.
Morning Ireland had Gerry from Irish Water on talking about the First Fix scheme and how Irish Water are fixing leaks detected by meters.
Guess what ads started up in the breaks? Yup! Irish Water fixing leaks.
This is where the strange universe intervened.
Morning Ireland tweeted this headline and photo afterwards:
"Repairs after water meters identify leaks" - is the headline.
The implication of the photo under that headline is that the leaks are at the meter boxes.
If fairmess, it was proably "Do we have a stock photo of some Irish Water digging going on"
At the same, the photo may be bang on the nail for the headline.
Thank you Morning Ireland stock-photo-chooser.
Thank you mysterious Universe. Hilarious win!
PR, propaganda, spin
"We're fixing huge leaks" is a great PR move. Make a huge song and dance about fixing leaks. Just don't mention that you're causing many huge leaks in the first place.
Meanwhile in the water mains
On a slightly related note, here's a PR conflict: How to advise people of disruption to water supply but not have people notice? Ooooh - difficult.
About 50% of treated water is believed to be leaking from mains piping. Contrast that with about 6% believed to leak in/around houses. Yet €540 Million spent on installing meters - causing major leaks in the process. The meters will not be used for billing until 2019 - at which stage many will replacing.
Meanwhile, the @IWcare Twitter account spews a constant stream (no pun intended) of advisories er "burst mains". Have a look at this Twitter search https://twitter.com/search?q=%40iwcare%20burst%20main&src=typd
Early on October 8th, I stopped counting backwards at 300 "burst mains". The timeline was from early June.
Early June was when the @IWcare account took over from @IrishWater
announcements of customer related issues. Here are "burst main"
announcements from before then. https://twitter.com/search?q=%40irishwater%20burst%20main&src=typd
These are "burst" mains. These are the ones that call attention to themselves as spectacular water features.
Before they became "burst", they were invisibly leaking their part of the 50% of treated water leaking from mains.
Irish Water could detect these in advance by regional metering on the mains poples. They don't. They spend €540 Million installing domestic meters (and creating leaks).
More PR
Here's another great PR move. Claim that lots of people are getting bills that are under the capped charges. Just don't mention that some meters are clearly faulty and under-recording the actual volumes used.
See my current post on IrishWaterMeters.blogspot.ie for this one.
If you came to this post via a specific link to this single post, you can see the entire Irish Water Mistakes blog (including this post) at IrishWaterMistakes.blogspot.ie
By way of gradual introduction:
I stayed with some friends in Dublin over the Easter weekend. A number of things related to Irish Water came together and provoked this particular blog in the series.
The first part deals with mistakes made at government and Irish Water management level.
The second part deals with mistakes made at street level – with Irish Water carelessness causing a leak inside my friend’s house, and leaving him with a bill for €100, a meter he can’t read, and a constant inescapable reminder of the bad feeling caused.
This blog post is a sample of mistakes from top to bottom. These are just the glaringly obvious mistakes. They are the tip of the iceberg. With such a tip, what is hidden under the surface must be a complete zoo.
If you begin to experience a “tl;dr” ( Too Long; Didn’t Read) sensation as you read below, just skip to near the bottom, where I describe the mayhem of an installed meter. You will love it. Promise!
The sections below are:
Mistake: Recognising that a mistake was made – but being mistaken about the nature of the mistake
Mistake: Destroying trust by sounding just like a Minister dodging questions in the Dáil
Mistake: Not learning from the past
Mistake: Getting into bed with “third parties” in ways that are open to question
Mistake: Underestimating the intelligence of the audience
Mistake: Talking Male-Cattle-Excrement-Droppings
Mistake: Inventing the non-grant Water Conservation Grant
Mistake: Not understanding the Data Protection Act
Mistake: Being a bit cavalier with the concept of “Registration”
Mistake: Provoke people who were ready to be compliant customers.
Mistake: Spending 100’s of €Millions on meters that are not fit for purpose
Mistake: Charging €100 to do a meter check that the householder could do themselves if they could see all the digits of the meter reading
Mistake: Causing leaks in households and then boasting about detecting them
First-Fix?
Is water a human right?
What’s my position on water charges?
Mistake: Recognising that a mistake was made – but being mistaken about the nature of the mistake
My friends have the printed version of the Irish Times delivered to the house.
On Monday April 6th, the Consumer News section of the Irish Times had a story written by Conor Pope
Irish Water’s head of communications, Elizabeth Arnett had hand-delivered a sample Irish Water bill to Pricewatch / Pope in order to ‘splain how it was presented.
Talking about the bills did unfortunately entail mentioning some bad stuff – like
“As the number of bills grows, so will furious calls to Liveline and to the Irish Water helpdesk, which will provide 750 people to answer queries. Some people will have been billed too much, and some people wrongly billed or billed twice. And some will be billed for undrinkable water.”
Yes. The peasants are revolting, so there’s no trust or co-operation on the ground. You can’t even knock on doors of ‘respectable middle-class’ houses to confirm which meter is connected to which house or if all is ok.
The story then became doubly-unfortunate.
Mentioning mistakes in billing led Arnett dangerously off-message for her mission of the day.
“She is not only anticipating future errors but admitting to past ones. “There is no doubt we got things wrong,” she says.”
“One of the first mistakes was how the utility handled revelations that it spent €86 million on consultants during its set-up phase.”
The admitted cost started out at €50 Million. On January 9th, 2014, John Tierney stated that €50 Million had been spent on consultants in the previous year.
There was outrage.
On January 14th, 2014, the cost admitted to the Dáil Environment Committee had become €86 Million
This was from an overall €180 Million budget for establishment of Irish Water plus a contingency fund of €30 Million. This budget was for spending up to April 2015. http://www.thejournal.ie/irish-water-consultants-spending-1263769-Jan2014/
€44.8 million IBM
€17.2 million Accenture
€4.6 million Ernst & Young
€2.2 million KPMG.
€13.3 million 18 other contractors who were procured “to support the work” of the major providers.
€970,000 McCann Fitzgerald
€2.9 million A&L Goodbody.
Arnett acknowledges now that the way in which Irish Water handled this news back in January 2015 was “One of the first mistakes”
So now – with the benefit of hindsight and many months of mature reflection - she is going to explain the whole thing. She’s going to do it really well – without mistakes this time. She is after all Irish Water’s head of communications. You don’t get to that sort of position and salary without knowing your stuff.
Well OK, she didn’t know her stuff first time but she knows it now. We learn from experience. We’re “going forward”.
Pay attention now. What we are about to hear from her is undoubtedly going to be a classic model for students and practitioners of marketing and PR. It’s going to be so good that textbooks will be written about it. She’ll probably get some sort of PR Oscar thing for this.
She has the best possible advantage. What she is about to say is informed by the knowledge and analysis of the mistakes. She’s seen the reaction to the mistakes.
After she says it, everyone will calm down and wonder what all the fuss was about.
Here it comes….
Drum-roll…..
It’s gonna be awesome….
Here it is…..
“People had issues with the word ‘consultant’,” Arnett says, but she is unapologetic. “They were third-party service providers who were brought in on a temporary basis to get things done”
End of.
Mistake: Destroying trust by sounding just like a Minister dodging questions in the Dáil
Not quite what we were expecting there Elizabeth.
You are probably somewhat intelligent. The alternative to being terminally stupid here is that you are arrogant and cynical. You look us in the eye and feed us a dose of what you know to be utter shite.
You are saying that nobody would have batted an eyelid if Irish Water had said that the €86/96 Million had been paid to “third-party service providers brought in on a temporary basis to get things done”. Nobody would have wondered what those services were.
You are saying that the mistake was really our mistake – for getting all upset about a mere word.
Your apology for the mistake turn out to be “We’re sorry – but it’s your fault”
Get a clue!
Irish Water spent €86 Million on third-party consultants/services “to get things done”
OK
1. What ‘things’ – in detail – not just very general headings?
2. How much did each ‘thing’ cost?
3. What was the budget for each of those “things”? Did budgets overshoot?
This is a valid question. There is history.
Mistake: Not learning from the past
You remember Poolbeg. Yes you do.
Project abandoned after €97 Million had been blown – and way over budget.
"Dublin City Council criticised over spiralling costs of Poolbeg project
An audit of the Poolbeg Incinerator project has criticised Dublin City Council for spiralling costs now totalling over €80 million.
The report from the local government auditor found that project management was "weak" and "not adequate".
City Manager John Tierney has apologised for the shortcomings.
However, councillors called for an end to the project and criticised council management for the mismanagement of public funds.
The review of expenditure by the local government auditor report pointed out that consultants costs spiralled from original contract for €8m to over €24m.
This included public relations costs of €3m.
It found that the consultant’s contract breached procedure guidelines by not being reviewed in 2005 and there was a lack of financial records available and no minutes of meetings of the project management board..
Last month it emerged that Dublin City Council, which has paid more than €30 million to consultancy firm RPS for its services over the last ten years in relation to the proposed Poolbeg incinerator, was planning to terminate its contract with RPS.
It came after the intervention of the European Commission, which found that the contract did not conform with EU law, following complaints made to the EU by Sandymount residents Joe McCarthy and Valerie Jennings.
Dublin City Council’s contract with RPS was originally estimated at €8.3m but ended up costing around €30m.
Meanwhile, in a topical twist…
RPS advised Dublin City Council on Poolbeg while head of Irish Water John Tierney was Dublin City Council manager and two former RPS executives are now employed by Irish Water.
They are Irish Water’s head of asset management Jerry Grant and Elizabeth Arnett, who is now head of communications and corporate services in Irish Water.
Poolbeg was:
John Tierney at the helm
RPS (wirh Jerry and Elizabeth) quoting €8.3 Million, but getting €30 Million
No effective project management
Consultants taking millions but project out of control
No proper financial records
No minutes of meetings
Project abandoned after €97 Million blown
And now….
Irish Water is a bigger and far more expensive rerun of Poolbeg. Familiar faces – familiar “mistakes”. There are very probably many other faces that are familiar to each other, but not to the public.
It’s the Happy Gang from the Poolbeg fiasco, now entrusted with €Billions of state assets and budget for Irish Water
Making mistakes
…again
Mistake: Getting into bed with “third parties” in ways that are open to question
e..g. Siteserv
Catherine Murphy TD, for one, has been calling attention to this for some time. It’s started to gain traction.
The curious case of an ‘obsessive’ TD, the state losing millions, and a Denis O’Brien company http://www.thejournal.ie/catherine-murphy-ibrc-siteserv-2060991-Apr2015/
Extract:
“The State lost €105 million due to the transaction, in which Millington bought SiteServ for €45 million in 2012. A subsidiary of the company, GMC/Sierra, went on to be awarded a large water metering contract.”
Questions arose as to how Siteserv was sold.
Given the damming content of this extract from Department documents obtained under Freedom of Information, whatever lies under the blacked out redacted paragraphs must be dynamite.
The image above was one of the few pages handed over to Catherine Murphy that was not totally blacked out. For a fuller set of blacked out pages and video commentary see http://www.broadsheet.ie/2015/04/21/redactulous/
The kinds of questions being asked about Siteserv both being sold and then getting the Irish Water contract are absolutely guaranteed to drive people insane with rage. Paddy remembers, and wants to know why nothing seems to be changing.
It’s somebody getting a near monopoly to lay their fibre along Irish Rail trackbed and then Irish Rail managers going to work for somebody.
It’s the stench of the “culture of clientism, chicanery and downright corruption.”
In a situation where Irish Water is battling for consumer hearts and minds, creating situations that can be so questioned is definitely ‘a mistake’.
Mistake: Underestimating the intelligence of the audience
“But she believes the company has not sold its core message properly. “We have not talked enough about the service we plan to provide and the necessary infrastructural improvements that we will be making. Every single day, people use our services and trust that the service we provide will work. And it does work.”
“But we have not explained that the charges are for an essential service, and we will use it to invest in infrastructure and maintain that service. We still have 44 towns discharging raw sewage into the sea. This is the 21st century, and this is something we have to fix,” she says.
“But we have not explained that the charges are for an essential service”
That’s because the charges – even if they can be collected – don’t even cover the cost of the meters, computer systems and staff to originate and collect the charges.
€500 million on installing water meters.
A major part of the €44 Million to IBM and the €17.2 Million to Accenture was for systems around the whole billing process. Apart from the automated systems, there are major costs in running call centres.
They apparently spent €650,000 on a campaign showing cartoons of Irish Water laying new water mains. They have to be cartoons as they are concentrating on installing meters rather than of fixing the mains that are leaking 50% of the water coming out of the treatment facilities.
The meters, when universally installed, might help to detect only 6% of 7% of wastage. Anyone of even moderate intelligence can that that this spend is crazy when compared to the volumes leaking from mains. Meter the mains for a fraction of the cost and a significant multiple of wastage detected.
It seems clear that the focus on metering is primarily about preparing IrishWater for privatisation. The meters won’t become a billing vehicle until the billing caps are removed in 2019. In the meantime, there is little sign of anything being done about the 50% mains leaks.
Mistake: Talking Male-Cattle-Excrement-Droppings
“Arnett says that 30 per cent of people are using less than €65 worth of water each quarter, while another 20 per cent are close to beating it. “
This is very curious – and perhaps deliberately vague.
“€65” refers to the capped quarterly bill that a household with two or more adults will receive every quarter up until 2019. It also refers to households that have only one occupant, but have not registered with Irish Water as such.
In summary:
These are the consumption volumes for a range of household types originally agreed between Irish Water and CER. These represent the best estimates by “third-parties brought in” at huge expense.
Those would be averaged as opposed to absolute. They are the volumes on which the Assessed bills for houses without meters would have been calculated had the original billing regime gone ahead.
These are the volumes bought by the capped bill values under the new billing regime
These are reductions in consumption volume required to get down to equal the capped volumes
Note: The reductions required would be even greater as the assessed volumes above already included an expected 6% “meter effect” reduction in consumption.
The percentage reductions from “pre-meter” levels of consumption to cap levels would be
The day that the new capped charging system was announced, the government began this “Beat the Cap” message.
Enda Kenny claimed that 750,000 households could easily beat the cap and pay less than the capped charge. “Half the country”.
It does not seem at all credible that “half the country” would be so far under average consumption.
The truth will eventually come out as the quarterly bill for metered registered households emerge.
A problem is that for metered houses that have not genuinely registered with Irish Water, the metered volumes can not be evaluated against the number of occupants. Any analysis of consumption -even if Irish Water truthfully released the data – would be useless without the related occupancy data.
If there is any reality in “beat the cap” then this would raise interesting questions
If the government and Irish Water believed that “half the country” would be paying less than the original assessed charges, why the u-turn and release of the capped billing system? The stated reason for capping the charges was that the original charges were to high.
If they believed that “half the country” were using volumes less than the assessed volumes, it would mean that they had originally consciously set out to overcharge unmetered households by 20% to 50% via assessed bills.
Some 300,000 households are in blocks of apartments and flats where no plan exists as yet to install meters. Such households would have been overcharged ‘forever’.
I have a strong suspicion that “Beat the Cap” was simply short-term propaganda to try calm things down by leading people believe that the actual charges would be even less than the capped charges.
Mistake: Inventing the non-grant Water Conservation Grant
In summary:
The “grant” is primarily an attempt to defraud the Eurostat Market Corporation Test.
Government support to the tune of €100 per household per year is to be slipped into Irish Water’s revenue. Without that disguised support, Irish Water should fail the requirement that billing must cover 50% of its operating cost.
There is no requirement on the part of applicants to demonstrate any attempt as water conservation. All they have to do is to register with Irish Water and then apply to the Department of Social Protection for the €100 grant.
The prospect of mass non-payment of bills will have no effect on Eurostat. Calling attention to the nature of the “grant” fraud may have an effect.
Mistake: Not understanding the Data Protection Act
The initial Irish Water registration forms on paper and online asked for the PPS number of the householder and of any children under 18 and in receipt of Child Support benefit.
Anyone registering via telephone to the call centre was asked for PPS numbers.
Very late in the day, they came to realise that this was a breach of Data Protection.
Mayhem ensued.
The PPS numbers within online registrations could be erased with a few lines of program code.
The section recording PPS numbers on paper forms could not be physically cut out as the householder name and address was recorded on corresponding area of the other face of the paper sheet.
Registrations via telephone were recorded and retained.
Irish water had to ask people to register again, this time without PPS numbers.
In addition, since paper forms and telephone call recordings with PPS details had to be destroyed, anyone who had submitted bank details for direct debit payments had to resubmit that as well.
Mistake: Being a bit cavalier with the concept of “Registration”
It was very important for Irish Water to assert that very large numbers of people were registering with them.
From the start, there had been a campaign to
bin the registration forms
return them unopened – return to sender
return them unopened but with some message such as “No Contract ….” Written on the envelope
return them with some message written on the form
There have been rumours that Irish water was treating such returns as registration by whomever the form had been addressed to.
The fuss over re-registrations surfaced an interesting metric.
It seems that 70% of Irish water registrations were on paper forms, while 30% were online.
This is really strange.
When Local Property Tax was introduced, the registration pattern was the complete opposite – 30% on paper and 70% online. This would reflect current Irish society and the ubiquity of the Internet in homes and pockets.
70% opting for a paper return would seem an unrealistic proposition.
This would be an indication that some large proportion of paper registrations claimed by Irish Water was not comprised of genuine registrations.
The Mistakes above are all corridors-of-power / smoke-filled-rooms stuff.
Now we get to mistakes at the coalface (but with a dash of mismanagement)
Mistake: Provoke people who were ready to be compliant customers.
My Dublin friend was the sort of individual that Irish Water would see as a model customer.
He does not have an issue with the concept of water charges.
He registered. No problem.
He lives in a quiet and comfortable middle-whatever housing estate. This is not ‘sinister fringe’ territory.
The Irish Water crews arrived to install meters. They moved through the roads doing what they do. No protests. No communication with residents.
After they had finished and had moved on to another part of the estate, my friend noticed that he had no water in his kitchen tap.
He went looking and found the crew working at the far end of the estate. They asked for his road and house number and said they would check it out. Forty-five minutes later one of them arrived, opened the meter covers and turned on the stopcock that they had left closed.
My friend had water again.
The next day, he noticed that his kitchen tap was dripping steadily.
He called in his usual plumber/handyguy, who opened up the tap and fixed things. €50 – ka-ching!
About 10 days later he was out in his back garden and noticed a splish-splosh of water flowing in the downpipe from his roof gutter. It wasn’t raining.
The overflow pipe from his attic storage tank was one of those that releases water into the roof gutter.
He called his plumber again, but the guy was so busy that it took over a week before he could show up.
He climbed up in the attic and fixed things.
Some gritty material had accumulated in the ball-valve and prevented it from closing properly. Oh, and by the way, that had been the problem with the kitchen tap too. Another €50 – ka-ching!
My friend is down €100.
I asked if we could go look at his meter. I had never seen an Irish Water one ‘in the flesh’.
When I arrived at his house, it was clear that Irish Water had been there.
The pavements in the estate were dotted with fresh white concrete rectangles of varying sizes and positions relative to the pavement width. They contrasted sharply in colour with the existing pavement.
I had noticed something else about his one.
Right in your face, it is cut at a rakish angle to the pavement edge and his driveway.
Close up, you can see that someone marked the area for excavation in yellow colour as a rectangle that lined up with the geography. Whoever arrived with the power saw could not be arsed.
You can also see that the saw cuts remain and that the pavement concrete got chunks taken out at two corners. None of this has been made good.
Whoever finished off the wet fresh concrete was wearing blinkers. There was a disconnect in his mind betwen the wedding cake and the venue. The result is an accentuation of the careless cutting and inattention to detail.
My friend is down €100 due to Irish Water – and he’s got this to remind him of it every time he steps out his front door.
Looking at the pavements in the estate, it’s as if Irish Water walked a very large dog along each pavement, and the dog dropped flat white turds of varying sizes outside each house. It’s a sort of territorial claim.
These are relatively minor quibbles compared to what we found when we opened the lid.
Mistake: Spending 100’s of €Millions on meters that are not fit for purpose
This meter has only been in the ground about 2 months, and already it looks really beaten up. That’s because it started out that way – but I’ll come back to that below.
There we are – on hands and knees on the pavement – looking down the Irish Water rabbit hole.
Oh dear! It’s one of “those” meters.
As an aside: Note the cement spattered all down inside the meter box and over the meter as well.
The cowboys who put this in must have backfilled while not alone the top cover was off. The inside frost cover was clearly off as well. There is no disciplined procedure being followed here. It's "Lash it in there. 'Twill be grand."
The “meter” is actually two devices :
1. A mechanical water meter, with a numeric display of the reading – just like an electricity or gas meter.
2. An Automatic Meter Reader (AMR) unit on top of the meter. This electronic unit records and stores the meter readings at set times – like end of mount/quarter. It can also detect signs of a constant flow indicating a leak. It can transmit this data to a unit in a passing vehicle on command from that unit.
There are two types of meters and AMRs being installed.
In one of the types, the AMR unit prevents viewing of the last two digits on the meter display.
The leading digits (in white) correspond to 1000’s of litres – i.e. cubic metres
The last three digits (in red) correspond to 100’s, 10’s and units of litres.
With this particular meter, we can’t see the 10’s and units. We can only see the 100’s
Irish Water assert that all the units conform to standards, blah-blah, etc.
This is all very well if the objective is to measure the water consumption of cattle in slatted sheds.
It is completely useless if an objective is to empower people to manage their water consumption and/or check if they have a leak somewhere.
Open the meter box and take the reading.
You got 00009.4xx
You close up, go back in the house and do one of
No water use – because you want to check for a leak
Do a washup in the kitchen sink – How much does that take
Run the washing machine or dishwasher
Do your usual watering
Whatever it is you want to measure
With everything else off, fill container(s) of a known capacity and compare that volume with teh meter change.
Go back outside and take a reading.
Say you have 0010.0xx
How much water did you use?
There’s a problem
That starting 00009.4xx might have been 00009.400 or it might have been 00009.499
The ending 00010.0xx might have been 00010.099 or it might have been 00010.000
You could have used anything between 1 litre and 199 litres. Now. Isn’t that really helpful?
What if you are worried about a leak?
You have to go out and keep an eye on the meter – waiting for the visible red number to change. How long would you have to wait? You don’t know. The hidden digits might be at 00 or they might be at 99.
You could speed things up by having someone turn on a tap. They might have to run 1 litre through, or they might have to run 100 litres through before you see that red digit change.
You then know that you are the start point of a measurable 100 litres. That digit will now only change after exactly 100 litres has passed through the meter. Stop all water use in the house.
How long will that take? You don’t know.
If there is no leak, it will never change.
If there is a leak of say 5 litres per hour, it will take 20 hours before it shows. That’s 20 hours during which no water can be used within the house. No washing, no loo flushing. Perhaps you could have filled the bath and/or buckets with water before you started the test.
If you could have read all digits of the meter, you would have detected that leak in 20 minutes or less.
Irish Water have set a standard of 6 litres of constant flow per hour over 48 hours before they will flag a leak and offer (sometime) a First Fix.
Your 5 litres per hour does not reach that level.
You’ll leak 43,800 litres per year. When the billing caps are removed, your annual bill will be inflated by €162 because of that leak. By that time, of course, the cost per 1000litres will be more than €3.70
Irish Water are spending over €500 Million putting in meters. There are two types of meter. For one of them, the meter can not be read by the householder in anything less than 100 Litre jumps.
The person or persons who selected and approved those meters have exhibited a level of stupidity normally associated with generations of in-breeding.
What benighted mouth-breathing retard decided on those meters?
This isn’t “a mistake”.
This is banjo-music from Deliverance with Irish Water managers dancing in dungarees.
The people who decided to spends 100’s of €Millions putting in that garbage should not alone be dismissed with extreme prejudice. They should be led in chains through the streets so that people could pelt them with rotting vegetables,
Mistake: Charging €100 to do a meter check that the householder could do
themselves if they could see all the digits of the meter reading
(Added this 'Mistake' on 23rd June, 2015 after traditional and social media flagged the €100 meter-check fee.)
Irish Water say they will charge €100 to come and test a meter. If the meter is found to be faulty, they will refund the €100.
Why would anyone request a meter check?
It would because they didn't believe that the volume recorded in the bill could be correct.
But perhaps the meter is correct.
a) The houshold could be underestimating their usage, OR
b) There might be a leak somewhere after the meter
They could check for either of those by checking meter readings - as I outlined above.
BUT, if their meter is one of the unreadable ones, they are faced with being stung for €100 - which because the meter is recording correctly, they will never have refunded
Whoever in Irish Water sourced, approved and continued to install that particular unreadable meter model should be terminated with extreme prejudice.
It is bad enough that such meters were installed. it is absolutely criminal that people should be charged €100 for a simple check that they could have done themselves.
Back to my friend’s leak ..
Mistake: Causing leaks in households and then boasting about detecting them
The dripping kitchen and the major overflow from the attic tank were caused by material introduced via the water supply immediately following the installation of the meter.
It is very easy to see how this happened.
This famous image shows a meter connected and ready for backfill of the excavation. It’s not my friend’s meter but is apparently typical of how they do it.
That’s 14 joints!
That’s not plumbing. That’s Lego for unskilled labour.
Although such pipes readily bend, it is true that there should not be strain where they enter a connector. Nevertheless, this looks OTT.
Those connectors look like screw/compression rather than push-fit. This opens up strong possibilities of insufficiently tightened joints – particularly when the installer has 14 of them to tighten in a restricted space and under time pressure. Some might have small but constant weeping. Some might become more significant – but hidden – after the backfilling of the excavation imposes strain on the pipes.
The certain downside of doing it like that is that the installer has at least 6 short pieces of pipe lying around in a dirty environment while the think is put together. This introduces multiple opportunities for small stones and grit to end up inside the pipes.
There are very probably operation manuals that mandate proper best practice and flushing afterwards. In my experience of tradesmen, they can take a lot of shortcuts in practice. Added to that, a lot of these guys are pulled of the live register and given a short course.
Irish Water and the government are feeding the media with stories of how the meters are discovering houses with leaks that could fill Olympic swimming pools.
The media regurgitate that in headlines.
There’s just a tiny problem with this.
The leak in my friend’s case was caused by sloppy work, materials and procedures on the part of Irish Water.
I would lay strong odds that this situation is widespread throughout all meter installations.
It might be that the plumber was unable to get to my friends house for over a week because he and his peers were busy fixing taps and ball-valves in the wake of the meter installers.
The Irish Water meter installation process could be described as “Bird-Calling”
Fly in – Drop a piece of shit – Fly out again
“According to the meter readings, 2,500 customers were losing more than 2,000 litres of water every day through leaks.”
There is another issue.
Had Irish Water detected the situation after their van had passed by and picked up the meter readings, they would have come to check but done nothing to fix it.
This is because the leak was inside the house.
Meanwhile, as Irish Water spend hundreds of millions on setting up and installing meters and billing systems, they do little or nothing about the 50% or so of treated water that is leaking from mains pipes.
Is water a human right?
Certainly in a society where we can’t all drill wells or forage for clean water, a certain amount of water has to be free.
If the electricity or gas supply fails, we can still survive.
Without any water, a reasonably healthy person in a non-extreme climate might last 2 to 5 days.
In a reasonably organised society where water meters are in use, a household should have a minimum essential water supply free of any charge. The costs for that should come out of central government funds. By all means charge for water above those levels.
What’s my position on water charges?
I don’t have an issue with the overall concept of water charges.
It’s normal in many other countries that I’ve been in.
I signed up way back at the beginning.
Then I started to look into the background.
I’m not a politically active person. You wouldn’t have found me at protests or political meetings/rallies.
At this stage, I have a huge problem with the entity that is Irish Water. As far as I am concerned , it has to be dismantled.
I won’t pay the bills when they arrive.
To roll over and pay would be to validate a gigantic and dishonest clusterf**k.
People are sick to death of politicians on huge salaries, expenses and pensions and who are disconnected from the reality of people less privileged than they.
They see the same old, same old sleaze, incompetence and cronyism going on.
Irish Water is something very tangible to focus their rage (or even strong irritation) on. It’s not just yet another thing going on behind closed doors.
Setting up Irish Water in the manner in which it has been done is one of the most stupid things that any Irish government has ever done. It might even be the most stupid.
I think this article captures what the opposition to Irish Water is really about:
