Here's how much water costs

Water - 0.05% the price of beer.

Here's how much water costs

Your water is going to cost you €4.88 per 1,000 litres - or 0.485 cent per litre.

The average person uses 52-55 thousand litres of water a year, so that's about €250 – but it's all very abstract when we put it like that.

So here's what things cost, in everyday terms.

Washing yourself: 25—72c a go

A shower will set you back 50 - 150 litres of water. This depends on the flow rate of your shower and how long you're in it. Power showers use a lot more.

The average American shower uses about 65 litres - that's 31.6 cent.

If your usage goes up to 80 litres - about a bathtub full - that's 38.9 cent for every shower.

And if you use a whopping 150 litres - which you'd really need to be taking long power showers to do - you're looking at 72 cents to clean yourself.

Tea-lightful - 1c

Let's say your average kettle has a "minimum" marker at the half-litre mark. That means you need to put in at least 0.2 cents just to boil the thing for two small cups.

There are 2000 pints in A Pint

There are 1.75975 imperial pints in a litre, so that means a pint of water will cost you 0.27 cents (or .23 cents if you use American pints, which are about 2.11 per litre).

That means you could have 1,704 imperial pints of water (2,000 US pints) for the price of a pint of beer (at €4.60 a pint). So beer costs about 0.05% as much as beer.

A packet of cigarettes?

That's 1914 litres, or 4043 pints, of water (if your cigarettes cost €9.30 / pack). Enough for almost a month's worth of baths.

Flushing money away – 5c

It's roughly 10 litres of water every time you flush the toilet.

At 10 x 0.485, that's 4.85 cent a go - but let's round it up to five.

If your house flushed the loo six times in a day, that's an entire Freddo bar gone.

Rub-a-dub-dub - 5c

A dishwasher doesn't use as much as you think - maybe only 10-12 litres of water per wash (but that depends on your washer). That's comparable to flushing the loo, at 5 cents.

Washing dishes by hand is harder to quantify - but if you leave the tap running and rinse off every plate and cup, you can waste up to 50 litres - or 24cents.

Scaling up

These are all tiny costs, of course, but the issue is that it all adds up. Your costs can vary hugely based on:

• The size of your toilet cistern

• The flow rate of your shower head

• How many people live in your house

• How long your showers are

• How you wash your dishes

... which makes it hard to know until that first bill arrives. However, Irish Water has said that bills will be capped for certain households - those with leaks and customers with medical conditions to begin with, so there's that.

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