Start with the meter
It is the one part of the water bill a household can actually inspect. Everything else on this site follows from understanding it.
Where is my water meter?
Outside under a plate in the path, inside under the kitchen sink, or shared in a block. What the cover looks like and how to lift it safely.
Find it →How to read a water meter
Which digits count, which are decimals, and why the red dials are the ones that tell you whether you have a leak.
Read it →Meter or rateable value?
The rule of thumb, why it is only a rule of thumb, and the trial period that lets a household change its mind.
Work it out →What is in the water
The other reason people go looking: the kettle keeps furring up, or the water does not taste of much good. Different causes, different answers, and the quickest way to waste money is to buy the fix for the other one.
Hard water
Where it is hardest and why, how to tell without a test kit, and why it is a nuisance rather than a health risk.
Read →Are softeners worth it?
What ion exchange does, the drain and the salt nobody mentions at the point of sale, and what decides whether the sums work.
Read →Filters, honestly
Jug, tap, under-sink or reverse osmosis — judged on cost per litre rather than shelf price, and what none of them do.
Read →How dry has it actually been?
Enter a postcode and Water Pages reads the nearest Environment Agency rain gauge there and then — 24-hour and 7-day totals, plus the levels of nearby rivers. Actual recorded readings, not a forecast and not a regional average.
Why an independent site
England and Wales are served by around sixteen regional monopolies. A household cannot switch supplier, cannot shop around, and cannot take its custom elsewhere if the service is poor. The only organisation with a complete view of a household's water is the company billing it.
That company cannot be neutral about whether a meter would suit that household, because it earns from the answer either way. It is not an accusation, it is a structural fact, and it is the reason a resource like this one has something to add.
Water Pages takes no payment from water companies, sells no placement, and sources every figure it publishes.
Who answers for all this
A household cannot switch water company however badly it is treated. Where a market would normally do the disciplining, the public record has to do it instead — and nearly all of that record is free to read.
Privatisation, on the register
All ten water and sewerage companies of England and Wales were incorporated on the same morning in 1989, in one unbroken block of company numbers. Every entry linked, so you can check it yourself.
Read →Check your company yourself
Executive pay, debt, ownership and pollution records are all published. The four free sources, and the three checks that stop a pay figure being quoted wrongly.
Read →