Each member of your household probably uses 50 to 100 gallons a day. A faucet running uses 1.5 gallons a minute. You probably have barely enough water for your houshold with little extra for watering or pool use.
You can MAKE water by burning Hydrogen.
Virtually all other water is used water.
On Thu, 11 Aug 2011 15:43:36 -0700, SF Man wrote Re Re: May I compare my well water setup to yours (3,094 usable gallons):
No, you did a pretty good job there. I believe you now have a good estimate of what your well and pump can supply over a 24 hour period.
Your in-house water use will be about 50 GPD/person. Slightly more if you have people taking extra long showers.
You mentioned earlier that your pool use was about 100 GPD ?
Now all you have to do is figure out your irrigation use. My guess is that irrigation will be a load that your well can't handle during the drought.
The meters are bronze. No lead. At the moment they are common on ebay because many areas are switching to metering that can be read electronically. So surplus regular meter stock is being sold off. A few bucks more to adapt the meter connections to glavianized or pvc.
You really don't know anything about aquifers do you? The water he sprays on the lawn and leaking out of the pool does not end up back in his well.
This is part of the problem out there. All these people think they can have these huge expanses of lawn in basically a dessert. Eventually it gets like the oil situaton, they are using water from the aquifer at a rate faster than it is being replenished.
He has the huge tanks for fire protection, irrigation, and filling the pool. Not related to the domestic use. He has ignored obvious water wastage like the leaky pool and the zillion head lawn sprinklers because he thought the water was practically free. He probably has neighbors doing the same things.
The level of the aquifer in proximilty to his well can get pulled down to the point where he can not get enough water out of it. Around a well the aquifer will look like a bowl when the well is in use. How deep the bowl is depends on how much water is being drawn out and how fast water can move through the substrate around the well. If the lowering is prolonged then he needs a deeper well. Otherwise he can wait it out and the level will slowly recover.
That Rain Bird model 1800 uses .1 gpm/ head
Not the best use of 6000 gallons/mo. of H2O during a drought. You're (were) watering enough for a whole household to use for 'normal' use.
I hope you're not running 3 pool pumps all day long in the sun. What a huge waste of electricity.
Since you obviously have the means, why not take this "problem" and turn it around into a eco-friendly solution? Nobody said you have to give up anything, I'm asking if you'll re-think the "big-picture".
You have an abundance of sunlight, but a shortage of water. Turn the sunlight into water. ROI for solar panels is still about 20 years, but it's not always about the $$.
SNIP
SNIP
JG-
Our California legislature, in their infinite wisdom, passed legislation that require 100% Lead Free alloys for devices used on potable water.
Many mfrs & suppliers now have a CA compliant model & "the rest of the country".....there a few other states that have this requirement.
The amount of lead in the "non-lead free" units in not really very high . If I were the OP I'd consider a used one on eday (as was sugested)
cheers Bob
You can get new ones on ebay. Cheap. And bronze is copper and tin. I'm guessing the manufacturer is sticking a california sticker on some of them and doubling the price.
I'd be thinking about getting several in the OP's sitiuation. You could put one on the irrigation, one on the house, one on the outdoor lines and pool.
JG-
I am fully aware of the main alloying elements in brass & bronze. However there are minor alloying elements that are added or controlled to effect the alloy's final machining, forming or casting properties.
The folks in Sacramento want all metal alloys that come in contact with potable water to be "lead free". The new limit is .25%. :)
I was I worried at 3%, no.
So, no..... it's not just a relabeling issue.
cheers Bob
Facts and figures are good for evaluating your capacities, but usage is the most important factor. Me and my wife use approx. 4000 gallons a month. With 3 teenagers, your wife and yourself, I would guess that you would use close to 8000+ per month. Then on top of that, figure your pool, irrigation and other little things such as washing cars and etc.
You may be able to configure your pumping times to give you more Gallons per day. You should also do flow test on your well to see what the GPM's are so that you get the most out of it.
Hank
I wouldn't bet on it. How much more expensive is it to have two manufacturing lines than to make one that is compliant and label some of them one way and the rest another?
Remember the old 5 1/4" floppy disks? There was two flavors, regular and high density. But manufacturers simply had one line and labeled some high density and others regular.
Good point. It all depends on how expensive it is to make the compliant ones, how the factory is set up, etc. Could be cost effective to just make them all the same.
In semiconductors you can offer chips with different performance characteristics, ie faster, wider operating temp range, which all come from the same wafer. The only difference is they are sorted into different bins during test. And in some cases, it's just a labeling issue, as they all meet the higher perf spec.
How does one turn sunlight into water with solar panels? Or anything else in a residential desert environment for that matter?
My well water comes from the city wells. Over a 150 of them, 8 million gals in ground storage, a couple of water towers and cost 42 dollars a month but that includes sewage and trash. The city says the state says the water supplied at the meter meets the current drinking EPA drinking water standards. Chlorine and fluorine are added other than that no treatment and it's fairly hard well water.
Thanks for that calculation! I have the sprinklers off, at the moment, and, I think I'll drastically change the cycle in the ten months when it doesn't rain.
I don't have solar yet (although most of the neighbors do). We have more sun than we know what to do with. It's sunny from 6am to 9pm at the height of the summer. Rarely is it a cloudy day. The fog comes in at night and dissipates by 10 am when it's around.
Only two of the pool pumps are constantly running during the day. It's useless to run them at night because of the solar heating panels (they'd be solar cooling panels at night). So, they have to run during the day. One pump is for the fancy cleaning system; and the other pump is for the filter. Both must run at the same time (2.2 horsepower each). They run about 15 hours a day. I really have no choice in that matter, unfortunately, except to put up about 50K dollars and go solar with about
15 KW of panels.
Exactly. More sun than I know what do to with; and not enough water to do much with!
Huh? How?
I calculated the ROI was about 7 years since we're paying about 50 cents per KW hour for the last two weeks (or so) of the month (it starts at 12 cents per KW hour for the first week or so).
I asked about and got a whole bunch of answers.
Basically, nobody really knows where their water comes from out here. Everybody seems to have a 400 to 800 foot deep well (it's hill country so just the elevation changes are that much easily). Some have multiple wells on their property.
Most have larger holding tanks than I have (they have three and four, while I only have two). There's some kind of zoning thing where you're better off with multiple small tanks than one big one.
Anyway, I don't know where the water comes from - but - I'm leaning toward the theory that it's a thousand years old water myself.
That's what I'm doing (I have no other choice).
In the last two days, the tank level changed by 20 inches.
That's 20x40 gallons per inch (approx.) which is 800 gallons.
So, it looks like the well, in the middle of the dry season (roughly March or April to December), can only supply about 400 gallons per day.
So, my 'ration' will have to be 400 gallons per day ... like it or not.
I misunderstood your very first reply.... I thought you meant they were relabeling "leaded brass" as lead-free.
It would all depend on the cost of batch control vs all lead free.
cheers Bob
G.Morgan kindly calculated that for us:
6,000 gallons/30 days = 200 gallons/day.Based on the fact the tank level rose 20 inches in the past two days, I'm estimating that the well can supply, in the middle of the dry season, 400 gallons per day (at 40 gallons per inch of tank).
So, I agree with you.
In the dry season, I can't "afford" to irrigate as much (because the house uses whatever it uses, and the pool uses about 500 gallons every few days).
So, here's my short-term plan:
- Shut off the irrigation (the plants will need to fend for themselves)
- Fix the pool leaks
- Irrigate manually only when the tanks are full
I'm curious how much a pool evaporates.
Those of you with a pool, assuming no leaks, how much does yours evaporate? (Note: The pool surface area is approximately 900 square feet and it's in the sun all day, from 6am to about 8pm or so right about now).
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.