The device in the photo, a water meter, measures the supply of fresh potable water that enters your house from the city/community/neighborhood water utility. Typically a radio transmitter is attached and the field techs read your consumption from out on the street as they pass by. Gone are the old days when Mom was home all day to let Mr. Waterworks into the basement to read the meter. You are charged by most utilities for the number of cubic feet of water you consume (app. 8.3 gallons per). In some cities you are also charged for your sewer contribution on the assumption that what comes in must go out. Tough to argue with, innit?
The typical American household consumes 107,000 gallons of water per year. The rule of thumb in our society is 90 gallons per person per day. In Europe, the average is 53 gallons per person per day. In sub-Saharan Africa, 3 to 5 gallons a day per person. They obviously have done away with all their teenagers somehow. Of our lavish allotment, per person, 14 gallons goes right down the drain in leaks and spills. Fix that toilet, fix that faucet, turn off that hose while you soap the car. App. 20 gallons is used for watering and irrigating. Think of all the apartment dwellers spraying their potted pets, and you'll get an idea of the thirst of America's corporate and residential lawns. Twelve gallons for bathing, 15 for laundry, 20 for flushing the toilet, 15 more for cooking and doing the dishes, and as Mr. Bojangles says of the rest, we drinks a bit.
I hear you protesting. You don't, you say, use your entire average quota. You only flush once in a while, shower briskly and in Navy-inspired bursts of water, you fill the dishwasher every time before running it, run full loads in the laundry, spit on your plants as you walk by and don't water your lawn hardly ever. Well done. That's still your quota- 90 gallons per day. Somewhere someone is using all our hard-earned conserved water, and we must hunt that person down and stop him/her. Problem solved.
My house is served by one of the last dug wells in our town. 14 feet deep soaking wet, it supplies all our needs, maintains drinkable quality and needs treating only for acidity. We pump it up into the house, use what we need, send it all out into the septic tank and leach field, it filters through 100 feet of sand and gravel back into the well, and we use it again tomorrow. Sort of like that scene in WaterWorld where Kevin Costner does that thing with the cup and the plunger and then...... drinks it. Yumm....
If you are supplied with city or community water, your story is different. Every gallon you don't flush, shower, leak, rinse or otherwise send down the drain is a gallon for which you don't pay. So a 1.6 gallon-per-flush toilet, a 2.5 gallon-per-minute kitchen faucet, and a front-loaded low-water clothes washer will save you real cash and pay you back for your extra investment in quality appliances and plumbing fixtures. And sending your teenager to an Outward Bound experience in which he/she will not be able to bathe for two weeks could be a true epiphany and result in shorter showers and a precocious awareness of the fragility of our global water supply. Or it could just send her running to the shower every time she remembers that icky dirty feeling. For years. Costing you bunches of extra money for water. On top of the fee for the Outward Bound trip. Forget it. Just install a stingy shower head and a mixing valve. We'll talk about those things next time. And the title is a quote from Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
The typical American household consumes 107,000 gallons of water per year. The rule of thumb in our society is 90 gallons per person per day. In Europe, the average is 53 gallons per person per day. In sub-Saharan Africa, 3 to 5 gallons a day per person. They obviously have done away with all their teenagers somehow. Of our lavish allotment, per person, 14 gallons goes right down the drain in leaks and spills. Fix that toilet, fix that faucet, turn off that hose while you soap the car. App. 20 gallons is used for watering and irrigating. Think of all the apartment dwellers spraying their potted pets, and you'll get an idea of the thirst of America's corporate and residential lawns. Twelve gallons for bathing, 15 for laundry, 20 for flushing the toilet, 15 more for cooking and doing the dishes, and as Mr. Bojangles says of the rest, we drinks a bit.
I hear you protesting. You don't, you say, use your entire average quota. You only flush once in a while, shower briskly and in Navy-inspired bursts of water, you fill the dishwasher every time before running it, run full loads in the laundry, spit on your plants as you walk by and don't water your lawn hardly ever. Well done. That's still your quota- 90 gallons per day. Somewhere someone is using all our hard-earned conserved water, and we must hunt that person down and stop him/her. Problem solved.
My house is served by one of the last dug wells in our town. 14 feet deep soaking wet, it supplies all our needs, maintains drinkable quality and needs treating only for acidity. We pump it up into the house, use what we need, send it all out into the septic tank and leach field, it filters through 100 feet of sand and gravel back into the well, and we use it again tomorrow. Sort of like that scene in WaterWorld where Kevin Costner does that thing with the cup and the plunger and then...... drinks it. Yumm....
If you are supplied with city or community water, your story is different. Every gallon you don't flush, shower, leak, rinse or otherwise send down the drain is a gallon for which you don't pay. So a 1.6 gallon-per-flush toilet, a 2.5 gallon-per-minute kitchen faucet, and a front-loaded low-water clothes washer will save you real cash and pay you back for your extra investment in quality appliances and plumbing fixtures. And sending your teenager to an Outward Bound experience in which he/she will not be able to bathe for two weeks could be a true epiphany and result in shorter showers and a precocious awareness of the fragility of our global water supply. Or it could just send her running to the shower every time she remembers that icky dirty feeling. For years. Costing you bunches of extra money for water. On top of the fee for the Outward Bound trip. Forget it. Just install a stingy shower head and a mixing valve. We'll talk about those things next time. And the title is a quote from Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
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