That heavy thud in your mailbox
isn't the last of the fireworks from Independence Day - it's the sound of the
new water rates - higher bills begin landing this month. It's déjà vu all over
again. Rate increases of 8 percent on top of January increases will raise bills
for a typical family home by about $8 a month - $16 per bill - higher than they
were one year ago.

Don't look for water costs to level
off anytime soon. Water prices will rise again this year by as much as another
20 percent, to pass on the costs of buying the ever more expensive and scarce
stuff.

You have to be able to do some
mighty fine ciphering and gazintas, as Jethro Bodine used to say, to understand
much more than that. Water bills are a complicated stew of water and service
fees - the largest chunk of the bill - and the actual amount of water used,
which is pretty cheap.

(Imagine what you'd think if your
gas station charged entry and exit fees, and about a quarter of what the
gasoline costs at the pump. Your interest in the cost per mile, the miles to a
gallon, and the gallons burned would go from 60 to zero mph, and you'd just try
to avoid going to the gas station and paying the cover charges.)

But we can't stop going to the
meter - it's there every billing cycle.

At the meter, charges are assessed
based on the size of the pipe. Size matters - more than the volume we use. So
if you use 14 hcf (like filling the bedroom, 12-feet by 14 feet by 8 feet),
about $42 worth of water, your monthly use - half the bill - will be $58 with
3/4 inch pipe and $63 with 1 inch pipe. That's $5 for a ¼ inch difference,
using the same amount of water.

The second time you fill that
bedroom - are we soggy yet? - it will cost $45.20, just $3.20 more, and the
third filling gets us to $50.75 or so for that last 14 hcf (at a rate of
$3.625). A typical San Diego household fills that bedroom twice in the
two-month billing cycle.

Most houses have 5/8 or 3/4 inch pipe that's charged
at the same rate - put the hammer back in the drawer - and will see the cost
for that flat rate rise from $33 to $35.18 on the bi-monthly bill.

So that puts a typical household's bill for water
alone at about $103 for two months.

http://www.sandiego.gov/water/rates/rates.shtml

Add to that a sewer fee of between $28 and $30, and
charges of $3.36 for each HCF they believe ends up in the sewer - they say 9
hcf is typical. Sewer rates went up in May.

http://www.sandiego.gov/mwwd/residential/rates/singlefamily.shtml

So a typical family is looking at looking at water
bills of about $160

WANTED: MORE INFORMATIVE BILLS

How do we save money? The only place to look for
savings is in the water we're using.That first $75 or so is pretty much fixed.

It
would be great if the city's water bills helped us better understand what we're
doing with the stuff. For a lot of us, the water bill is the only bit of
information we get about how we use water and it ain't much.

Once
every two months the bill shows up - and the hunt for clues begins.

Am
I conserving? Is there a leak in the pipes? How am I doing for the size of my
house and the size of my family? Are my efforts to conserve succeeding?

Hard
to tell. I can tell if I used more water than this time last year. If only I
could remember what I was doing this time last year. How was the weather? Did I
have guests? Was I home? Hmmmmmm.

Wouldn't
it be great if there were some measures in the bill that gave me more
information? And if it was in a form I understood?

Confusion
starts with the measurements: water is billed in HCF - a hundred cubic feet.

What
that means in gallons, I have to use a calculator to figure out. That makes
things tough. I see water talked about in acre-feet, hcf and gallons - often in
the same place. Consistent measurements would be nice, and one that I could
picture, like gallons, would be even nicer.

But
the bill could tell us more.

Is that waaaay a lot of water?

It
could tell us if we're using an awful lot of water for a home our size - by
linking our lot size to our water use. The cities and counties already have
that information in our parcel data. The bills could take the typical number of
people in homes in our neighborhood; add it to what it would take to water a
lawn on the parcel (lot square footage minus house square footage, with some
allowance for pavement).

The Water Department does have 275,000 customers and that's a lot of data. But most spreadsheets can do that simple math, like {(lot size)-(house size) x 80%} x (how much water needed to keep landscape healthy) for 25,000 records at a time. 

Did something go wrong?

A
lot of people find out about a leak when the bill comes - just yesterday I
heard a story from a neighbor who'd checked his water lines because his bill
showed he used 3 HCF more than normal and found a pipe leak in the main, near
the water meter.

Of
course, with cheap water, letting the water pour out cost less than $10, far
less than the $375 repair he paid for. And another acquaintance fixed his
continuously running toilet only after it got bad enough to run through a
couple of HCF in a two-month billing cycle.

Wouldn't it be great if there were some big red
letters on the bill to suggest there may be a problem, especially since the
water department has the information on hand to identify a one-time jump in
water us