Some 30,000 leaks have been found during the first water meter reading cycle, according to Irish Water. The national water utility says the leaks are wasting 46 million litres of water from homes every day "enough to fill 18 Olympic size swimming pools".
The first reading of water meters took place at the end of last year. Irish Water says “approximately 7 per cent of all meters read to the end of 2014 indicated a leak on the customer side of the meter”.
Households are entitled to have a free leak investigation to find the leak and a free repair of leaks located between the meter box and point of entry to the property.
Elizabeth Arnett, spokeswoman for Irish Water, said the numbers showed the northwest region has the highest number of household leakages.
“We can be precise [with customer properties] because of the water meters. The vast majority [of leakages] is no doubt on the supply side,” she said.
Households are entitled to have a free leak investigation to find the leak and a free repair of leaks located between the meter box and point of entry to the property.
Ms Arnett said landlords had a legal obligation to fix the leak on their property and tenants had a right to request a leak to be fixed as they were responsible for the water charges.
Ms Arnett said workers would start taking meter readings from April 1st for the first quarter of the year.
She told The Irish Times when all the water meters were installed, just 12 people would be employed from four companies to take the readings.
Ms Arnett said the readings would automatically sync with the computers in the workers’ van when they drove beside the meters, without them needing to open the door or get out.
She said up to 39,000 households would be sent bills daily from mid-April through to June.
Ms Arnett said of the total of 1.7 million homes that will be billed, about 250,000 will not be Irish Water customers as they have their own water supply.
She said just fewer than one million customers had registered their details.
Ms Arnett said the terms of payment will be within 14 days but the “first bill won’t be hard and fast on this”.
The utility spokeswoman said about 50,000 metered households with non-unique addresses would receive a bill through “special mail” and a signature would not be required.
"An Post have a geo-spatial database, based on xy coordinates," she said.
Ms Arnett said the company got the go ahead from the Data Protection Commissioner to request names of tenants from private landlords and councils.
She said all local authorities had returned details totalling about 100,000 names but she did not have the figures for private landlords.
Obligations
Ms Arnett said the Government has signalled legislation would be introduced that if a tenant does not pay water charges and leaves the property, the landlord would be liable to pay it.
“If the landlord passes on the tenant’s name, we’re more than happy to engage directly with the tenant. We’re not asking landlords to collect money on our behalf,” she said.
The Irish Property Owners Association, which represents private landlords, has said it would resist attempts to force their members to collect the charges.
Brendan Ogle, Right 2 Water campaigner, said the group would continue protests throughout 2015.
“Irish Water are losing circa €10 million a year just collecting bills, without any investment whatsoever, even if everybody pays. Many people, maybe most people, will not pay,” he said.
Mr Ogle said the group would publish an alternative water policy in the coming weeks that would eliminate bills.
Ballymun councillor Noeleen Reilly (SF) said she had been contacted by local residents who said they were not notified of a water cut on Monday (March 30th).
“I am even more concerned to learn that when residents tried to deal with the issue themselves they could not proceed without registering with Irish Water,” she said.
Ms Arnett said the company were investigating the incident but it was not procedure to check with the customer database while fixing water issues.
“There is absolutely no truth in that. We would of course look after water supply outage. It is ludicrous to suggest we would differentiate like that,” she said.
