“””i’ve lived in socal for over 20 years.
i’ve never seen any water conservation. people waste water here.”””
Simply isn’t true, see post 38. As a plumbing contractor and resident, the dramatic swing to water conservation has been very good for my business, and challenging for me as a resident.
Without belittling your efforts: Yes, those efforts add up to some token amounts of domestic water conservation, as well as tidy profits for you. And please, don’t think I’m begrudging your ability to make a profit here: go forth and profit as much as you can, because I’m a free market capitalist and wish you all the profits in the world.
But the water savings add up to nowhere near enough to deal with the projected water shortfalls, and they add up to nothing remotely approaching the water used to water lawns in SoCal.
If Californians want to be serious about reducing water consumption, the lawns have to be ripped out, the way they’re being ripped out in Vegas, Phoenix, etc. Not replaced with watering schedules, or “water only at night” etc. Rip the lawns completely out and replace with any sort of landscaping that requires *no* water. The non-lawn landscaping should be watered with grey water from washing machines and showers. (another profit center for you as a plumber! Installing black water/grey water drains!)
Let’s use some numbers, and I’m pulling the numbers for the size of lot/house/lawn out of the air, with some reality, but I’ll use reality for lawn consumption and toilet consumption.
Let’s assume a quarter-acre lot, with a 2,500 square foot house. That’s about 11,000 square feet of lot. Minus 2,500 square feet of house (kick in another 500 feet for the garage) and we’re looking at 8,000 square feet of unbuilt ground. Figure some is used in the driveway, walkways, etc. Let’s grind it down to 5,000 square feet of lawn.
5,000 square feet of lawn, times 80 inches of water used per year, is 33,333 cubic feet of water per year on the lawn. That comes to 249,348 gallons per year of water.
Let’s take the water saved by converting two toilets to low-flush toilets; feel free to correct me anywhere in here, as you’re a professional plumber and I’m just going off the top of my retired engineer head here:
Old toilets: 3.5 gallons per flush. Newer toilets: 1.6 GPF. Savings: 1.9 GPF.
OK, let’s see how much flushing we’d have to do to conserve that lawn water above:
249,348 / 1.9 = 131,236 (rounding up) flushes per year.
Divide by 365 to get how many flushes per day: 360 flushes per day.
See what I’m getting at? Unless we’re talking someone with *serious* obsessive-compulsive disorder here, there ain’t no way that folks are going to save that amount of water by installing a low-flush toilet. I might be an aberration here, being a farmer now and all (and piddling pretty much anywhere I darn well please outdoors throughout the day), but if I were living indoors all day, I’d have to be over-the-top wasteful to flush more than 8 or 9 times in a day. Times four for a typical family, and we’re looking at 40 flushes per day, tops, for that 2,500 square foot house.
40 flushes per day, times 1.9 GPF saved by low-flow toilets, and we’re getting 76 gallons per day of savings, compared to about 683 gallons used on the lawn.