How much water do YOU use?

[NW-Bound]

That cannot include a shower. A person who is prone to have kidney stones like myself is encouraged to drink around 3 quarts a day. With a total of 1.5 gal, after other uses, I would be lucky to have enough left for a sponge bath!

 

[harley]

That cannot include a shower. A person who is prone to have kidney stones like myself is encouraged to drink around 3 quarts a day. With a total of 1.5 gal, after other uses, I would be lucky to have enough left for a sponge bath!

One person living alone on a boat may not need to shower. Maybe a quick hop overboard works.

We're on a well too, so I'm not sure of the amounts. We irrigate (required by HOA) so I'm sure we use a fair amount. But I'm trying to minimize it, 3 times/wk in the summer, once/week in the fall. We have to keep the grass (or whatever is growing out there) green, but it bugs me to be throwing water away. The gray water is processed and used to water the golf course, so there's some tiny environmental savings there. We've got a front loading washer and energy efficient dishwasher. The geothermal system heats the hot water for free (in the warm months) so we're saving a little on electricity, but I love my long hot showers so I'm not helping the water usage there. I'm not home right now, so I can't check the sewer bill. I'm sure I'll be bummed out by the numbers.

 

[W2R]

One person living alone on a boat may not need to shower. Maybe a quick hop overboard works.

Maybe, if the boat is on a lake. As one who lived on a boat on saltwater back in the 1960's, I can tell you for a fact that salt is really itchy and irritating! Freshwater showers are a necessity. However, there were showers and toilets at the marina, so we only had to lug drinking and cooking water to the boat. Maybe that is what the other poster was referring to.

 

[teejayevans]

That must be one quick shower.

Yea, a "navy shower", use enough water to get wet, turn it
off to soap up, use enough water to rinse. Similarly with washing
dishes, no running the faucet, I use raw water to soak the dishes
to remove most of the grime. It doesn't count laundry that I do ashore.
I only have 65 gal. water tank, which is probably less than most
people use in 1 shower, which lasts up to 6 weeks.
TJ

 

[Urchina]

After a year of using this [water circulation pump] we are pleased with the results but I cannot see any difference in our water usage... so I think that any benefits are in the satisfaction of having another efficient device.

JohnP

We have turned our hot water circulation pump off because 30 years of hot water circulating through our copper, slab-buried pipes has resulted in three leaks in the past six years. These are extremely unpleasant due to the fact that our pipes are encased in the concrete of our slab foundation, and so the only way to fix them is to jackhammer them up and then cut out stretches to replace.

The leaks were all at bends in the pipes, or far points of the recirculation loop, where the years of hot water running by wore the copper thin. We soften our water, so it's probably a little aggressive, which I'm sure contributed to the problem as well.

If you have a regular raised foundation with crawl space underneath it's an easier fix, but for those of you with slab foundations and buried pipes you might want to consider the extra (even if minimal) pipe wear and tear involved.

 

[jblack]

A few months ago we moved into a new house and I noticed after the first couple of bills that are water usage was ridiculously high (~600 gallons/day) for just DW and I. After recording the water meter over a 48 hour period it was clear that the sprinkler system was the culprit, gulping down about 1000-1300 per usage.

That seemed quite surprising to me, esp since we have less area to water than the old house and the duration of the entire watering was less than what we did before. Regardless we cut back to watering from 4x per week to 2x and that reduced our bill dramatically.

Any suggestions on how to resolve or diagnose what potential problems might be in our irrigation system? Is there a way to test if some of that water is simply going down the drain before even making it to the sprinkler heads?

I guess I need to first do the basic math on and verify it's not a mistake but I just can't see how it uses 1000+ gallons in less than 30 minutes with so few sprinkler heads per section. The old house didn't use nearly this much.

 

[jazz4cash]

A few months ago we moved into a new house and I noticed after the first couple of bills that are water usage was ridiculously high (~600 gallons/day) for just DW and I. After recording the water meter over a 48 hour period it was clear that the sprinkler system was the culprit, gulping down about 1000-1300 per usage.

That seemed quite surprising to me, esp since we have less area to water than the old house and the duration of the entire watering was less than what we did before. Regardless we cut back to watering from 4x per week to 2x and that reduced our bill dramatically.

Any suggestions on how to resolve or diagnose what potential problems might be in our irrigation system? Is there a way to test if some of that water is simply going down the drain before even making it to the sprinkler heads?

I guess I need to first do the basic math on and verify it's not a mistake but I just can't see how it uses 1000+ gallons in less than 30 minutes with so few sprinkler heads per section. The old house didn't use nearly this much.

Do you get charged for sewer fees, and if so is there a submeter on the irrigation feed line?

 

[lazygood4nothinbum]

1 person, water savers removed from all faucets and especially from shower (i gotta great shower). 1,000/gal month for $24.58 & the city presumes all that water went into the sewer for an additional charge of $11.17.

i see on this bill that they charged me $0.20 as a drought surcharge on that 1,000 gallons, even though the last few storms recharged lake o to normal levels.

looks like there's also a storm water charge of $3.50, particularly bogus because we have no storm sewer system on my street. flooding is never a problem with only a few inches building up on the very worst of storms which are then quickly absorbed into the sugar sand of the dune upon which this area was built. i've rocked in both my driveway and the city easement, have no lawn, just garden and mulch, so that all rain water--even gardening & car wash water--is recaptured into the soil and filtered back down to the floridan aquifer.

the garden gets watered by mother nature and a well/pump/irrigation system. fixing & hooking up the irrigation system was my very first task upon purchasing the house and has served the garden well since.

 

[Ronstar]

A few months ago we moved into a new house and I noticed after the first couple of bills that are water usage was ridiculously high (~600 gallons/day) for just DW and I. After recording the water meter over a 48 hour period it was clear that the sprinkler system was the culprit, gulping down about 1000-1300 per usage.

That seemed quite surprising to me, esp since we have less area to water than the old house and the duration of the entire watering was less than what we did before. Regardless we cut back to watering from 4x per week to 2x and that reduced our bill dramatically.

Any suggestions on how to resolve or diagnose what potential problems might be in our irrigation system? Is there a way to test if some of that water is simply going down the drain before even making it to the sprinkler heads?

I guess I need to first do the basic math on and verify it's not a mistake but I just can't see how it uses 1000+ gallons in less than 30 minutes with so few sprinkler heads per section. The old house didn't use nearly this much.

Yes, sprinkling systems use a ton of water. I have 4 zones of 6 heads at approx 3gpm each that I run twice a day at 8 minutes per zone. So 4 zones x 6 heads x 3gpm x 16 minutes = 1152 gallons per day at my place.

In your case, I would try to figure out the gpm rating of your heads (from the manufacturers website, etc) and then figure out your projected flow from that. I also believe there are flow meters you can put on your main sprinkler line to measure actual usage. From this data, you should be able to compare what you are using to what you should be using. If there's a huge difference, you may have an underground leak. You can probably measure zone by zone to track down a possible problem

 

[jblack]

Yes, sprinkling systems use a ton of water. I have 4 zones of 6 heads at approx 3gpm each that I run twice a day at 8 minutes per zone. So 4 zones x 6 heads x 3gpm x 16 minutes = 1152 gallons per day at my place.

In your case, I would try to figure out the gpm rating of your heads (from the manufacturers website, etc) and then figure out your projected flow from that. I also believe there are flow meters you can put on your main sprinkler line to measure actual usage. From this data, you should be able to compare what you are using to what you should be using. If there's a huge difference, you may have an underground leak. You can probably measure zone by zone to track down a possible problem

Great idea....I'll put pencil to paper this weekend and see what's going on. I'm surprised that many sprinkler heads are 3gpm, though. MY (inefficient/normal) shower head is only 2.5 gpm and seems to have a much higher volume.

More to come....hopefully it's not a leak (!)

 

[segfault]

We have turned our hot water circulation pump off because 30 years of hot water circulating through our copper, slab-buried pipes has resulted in three leaks in the past six years. These are extremely unpleasant due to the fact that our pipes are encased in the concrete of our slab foundation, and so the only way to fix them is to jackhammer them up and then cut out stretches to replace.

With a crawlspace or basement, you'd want to insulate the pipes to reduce the heat escaping.

Ideally, there would be some sort of a controller on the recirculation pump that would run it for a minute or two and then shut it off... Just long enough to circulate the hot water rather than running continuously and allowing the heat to escape. There's actually a pump like that, I think it's called the Chili Pepper water pump, but it's not designed as a whole-house pump, and you might need more than one of them depending on your plumbing layout.

 

[CCdaCE]

It's $5.25 service charge plus about $5.50 per 1000 gal. in my neck of the woods. We use about 4,000 gal/mo. avg. Sewer is a fixed rate of $10-something. Family of 4, the kids are small. 'Bout 33 gal/person/day. Bill came to $36.06 last month.

On the issue of recirculating pumps in order to save water. Seems kind of pointless to me. 100' of 3/4" inside dia. pipe is about 2.3 gal. Maybe my assumption about inside diameter is a little off, but anyway. So buying a setup to recirculate a few gal. per day doesn't seem to make economical sense based on "cheap" water and sewerage, but what do I know. I just like to argue.

-CC