ANOTHER water tale from La La Land: Age Diary ran a story last Thursday from one of our readers, Andrew Dawson, who discovered that by simply adjusting his tap at the meter he could cut the water bill for his family of four in half without any discernible lack of amenity.

This was a Eureka moment that he attempted to share with the responsible ministers in Spring Street and at Yarra Valley Water, but he received no response, despite the CSIRO thinking it an idea worth pursuing. (Remember all this inactivity was conducted against a background of drought, declining water supplies and the threat of stage 4 restrictions.)

In the face of this official turpitude, Dawson turned to The Age. Diarist Lawrence Money put a question to Yarra Valley Water last Wednesday about whether cutting water flows to households might be a viable method of conserving water.

LIKE many lightning-bolt ideas, this one arose by chance. Kingsbury local Andrew Dawson wondered why, with wife and two kids, his water consumption bill was lower than the average posted on his Yarra Valley Water bill. Turned out that rust had partially choked his supply pipe, cutting the flow.

That’s when that cerebral light globe went on. “I experimented with the tap at the meter,” he told us yesterday, “and cut down the flow further until it took a minute to fill a six-litre container from the household taps.” Result: the latest Dawson bill shows an average 172 litres a day. According to Yarra Valley Water, the average four-person household goes through 525 litres a day and even the “efficient” household, employing water-saving techniques, uses 434 litres.

The Dawsons have been doing this for two years, saving heaps of water and piles of money, but here’s the crunch: when Andrew Dawson took this simple idea to Spring Street (including runaway minister Thwaites), Yarra Valley Water and other administrative paper-shufflers they just yawned. Not interested.

Remember, Thwaites was from the Spring Street bozos who are now spending $4 billion on desalination and pipelines. And the same bozos are spending further millions of your money lecturing (and threatening) you on restrictions and how to not waste water.

“The only positive result was from the CSIRO,” Dawson said. “They were interested in doing a study using a larger population sample — still are — but need public support. I’ve checked with the plumbing trade. They can’t see any long-term problem doing this. It’s easy, costs nothing.”

But of course less water use would mean less revenue for water authorities. That couldn’t be the problem, could it? Diary checked with Yarra Valley Water: was there some technical problem with cutting back the flow? YVW emailed a reply very late yesterday but “recalled” it a minute later so we still don’t know.