How much rain has actually fallen near you?

Not a forecast and not a regional average — the readings from the Environment Agency's own rain gauges, the nearest one to a given postcode, fetched live when the button is pressed.

Where these numbers come from

The Environment Agency runs a network of tipping-bucket rain gauges and river-level recorders across England and publishes their readings openly under the Open Government Licence. A tipping-bucket gauge records in small increments — typically fractions of a millimetre — every fifteen minutes, so a total here is a sum of real recorded increments rather than an estimate.

Two honest limits. Coverage is England; the network does not extend across Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, which run their own monitoring, so a postcode outside England may find no nearby gauge. And rain is local — the nearest gauge may be several miles away and a summer downpour can miss it entirely while soaking a street nearby.

What a low number means

A dry fortnight is weather. What matters for supply is a long dry run coinciding with high demand, because that is when reservoir stocks and river flows fall together while more water is being drawn. That combination is what leads a company to restrict use, and it is also the moment household water use gets most visible on a meter — garden watering is the single largest discretionary use in a metered home.