Comment by aidenn0
2 days ago
I'm somewhat astonished at the per-capita household use of water per day. I assume it must mostly be for watering lawns?
We have a swimming pool that leaks (we were quoted $125k to fix it since the deck will need replacing, and with interest rates being what they are, borrowing to fix it would be rather painful), and we use only 51gal/person/day at our home. I estimate that if fixing the pool would save another 10.
> I'm somewhat astonished at the per-capita household use of water per day. I assume it must mostly be for watering lawns?
I'd assume so. Would be interesting to see the water usage comparison between city dwellers and suburbanites.
Toilets (1.5 - 2.5 g per flush), then showers (2.5 g per minute), then clothes washer (about 15 - 20 g per load) are the big 3.
If you do 1 load of laundry per person per day (which is absurd), then the clothes washer cant' be even 1/4 of the over 80 gallons per person per day TFA claims.
Lawns use such an incredible amount of water, particularly people maintaining them in deserts, like in Arizona and parts of California. It boggles my mind that people go out of their way to put so much effort and resources just into having grass in front of their house that they mostly don't use.
Honestly, if you're maintaining a lawn in places that don't get year-round rain, you need to water it. I grew up in Seattle and it never occurred to me that there were places where you didn't need to water a lawn.
> Honestly, if you're maintaining a lawn in places that don't get year-round rain, you need to water it.
Only if you want to grow non-native species and always have it looking like a magazine cover.
My house is sitting in a five acre clearing covered in whatever flora decides to grow there, with minimal "curation" (tend to avoid cutting beautiful native flowers to encourage them to spread, do try and deal with removing things like poison ivy).
When it rains, everything greens up, grows quickly, needs lots of mowing. If it doesn't rain for a few weeks while the sun cooks it, some things will go a bit brown and lifeless. Then the next rain comes and it all perks right back up. When winter comes, it all sits under the snow for months and months and when the snow melts it picks right back up where it left off.
Most of these plants were here before we were and they'll be here after. They don't need my help.
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I guess my general question in those scenarios is why spend time and water maintaining a lawn of plants that can't grow normally in the local climate? There are definitely plants which survive in the area year round in many places in the US.
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yeah, our small suburban house in silicon valley can easily use 400 gallons per day on days where we water the small front and back lawns and drip irrigation, but on a non-watering day, we can use as little as 50 gallons for 2 people.
While this is "a lot" of water, when we've had an irrigation leak in a zone that runs for 5 or 10 minutes, the number can balloon to 900 gallons in a day.
The amount of water used by people who actually don't closely monitor and track their usage, with big properties, lots of plants and lawn to irrigate, must be truly mind-boggling. I wouldn't be surprised if tens of thousands of gallons per day was pretty common at a lot of houses.