When people say “were running out of water”, it really means “were running out of potable water” which IS a resource that can be created or destroyed.
In response to your comment about fixtures, that is partially correct. When the water reduction deadline arrived, not every manufacturer had the right amount of $ in R&D. Some had retooled, and others were retrofitting tank valves to meet the standard. Kohler and American Standard had products which worked well, and the others didn’t. Those two companies and a high-end import- Toto have continued to produce innovative designs which conserve water and function effectively, with one caveat-fixtures from the big box stores aren’t the same as those I purchase from a plumbing supply house. For that reason, I won’t warranty products supplied by the customer against defect.
The toilet water standard seems to have come about along the lines of the national appliance standards.
Several states and local governments had passed energy limits on appliances and the manufactuers prefered to be subjected to a simple national standard than what could have become thousands of possibly conflicting local requirements.
Before the tiolet standard, some areas were experiencing or fearing water storages. In the late 80’/early 90’s, NYC replaced tens of thousands of tiolets in private homes or apartments using taxpaper funds, mostly because of concerns of future sewer costs.
You can’t compare the water that comes out of your tap to the water used for agricultural purposes. It’s untreated, and hence “conservation” isn’t as important. If we’re talking about an area that isn’t suffering from significan water shortages, this is the critical point. Even in Chicago, wasting tapwater is silly because tapwater is not free. It costs money to run treatment plants, and it costs more money to build more treatment plants if demand exceeds capacity. The point isn’t that there’s a shortage of water in Illinois, because there isn’t, and irrigation, etc., doesn’t pull water out of the system, and hence can’t be described as wasting anything. Naturally, the issues are different in Vegas.
I can’t get your link to load, so I have no idea how it came up with that figure, but it seems rather outlandish to me. A steer raised for slaughter lives for, oh, 500-600 days. It drinks, towards the end of its life, 10-20 gallons a day, depending on the weather. Naturally, when younger it drinks much less, so lets take an average of 10 gallons a day over its entire life - a very generous figure. That’s on the order of 5000 gallons of water consumed over its entire life, which comes to somewhere around 6-8 gallons per pound of meat produced. So I can only assume that the chart factors in all the water used to produce the animal’s feed - irrigated grains and forage. That seems a tad ridiculous, though, not least because vast amounts of feed grain and forage production isn’t irrigated at all. I suppose he’s figuring how much rain falls on that cropland? :rolleyes:
Well, no. I realize it’s a back-of-the-envelope estimation just to put some actual numbers on the table.
First, as others have said, this is nonsense. I have a new toilet and I never use two flushes, let alone three or four. Perhaps some people do, and it is true that the earliest models were not very good. But that problem was solved long ago (except possibly for the very cheapest models). Second, had you bothered to look at my calculations, you would have noticed that I’m nowise stupid enough to put anything other than the most conservative estimate of difference into such an equation. I allowed only a 2 gallon difference per flush, not the 3.4 gallon difference that the OP had talked about.
How about you first coming up with any evidence (i.e. non-anecdotal) at all that any significant portion of the population needs more than one flush?
And while I’m asking questions, since when is “a load of crap” proper GQ usage?
But then again, we’ve been making water potable for centuries. With more people comes the necessity for more water… that’s a given, but I’d assume we’ve also built up the infrastructure for more purification. Even then, since it’s (usually) consumers that end up paying for it if they use more water, I don’t see why this should even be an issue. Maybe I’m just cheap.
Wait. Reading that makes it sound confusing to me. My argument was (in the end) that this shouldn’t even matter, as people should do things to save themselves money. If it means low-flow toilets/shower heads, then so be it; it’s less money spent on water.
Am I really going to be the first to point out a particular use for the showerhead that low-flow would defeat the purpose of?
Sources of water can be overused. Extraction of ground water can lower the water table, causing ground subsidence. And this is the kind of damage that can be done to the environment. The other usual option, building more reservoirs, obviously means destroying land, natural environments, and in most cases buildings.
And as for the money-saving aspect - we don’t actually pay very much for water. Not as much as for petrol, and has that stopped people from buying SUVs?
Right. But would we have a water shortage if high flow toilets and shower heads were used?
That’s not the right question. The right question is this: is any increased cost/decreased effectiveness of low flow toilets or shower heads greater in magnitude than the resulting savings in municipal water treatment facilities?
Assuming that modern LF toilets cost no more to manufacture than modern HF toilets, and that they flush just as effectively, per the testimony of several posters, the answer in the case of toilets obviously comes out in favour of LF. Showerheads are a little different, since beyond the objective criterion of whether a showerhead is adequate for the purposes of cleaning, there are subjective criteria regarding what sort of shower experience they provide.
This is a good point, but focuses only on the supply side. The Chicago area, along with most of our other major cities, has a number of combined sewers that carry both raw domestic wastewater and stormwater. During rainstorms, a mixture of untreated sewage and stormwater can be released directly to natural water bodies from Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO) structures.
If you live in an area served by combined system, every gallon of water that you keep out of the sewer is another gallon of combined sewage that can be treated properly at the wastewater treatment plant, rather than end up in lakes and rivers.
For those who complain about low-flow showerheads:
I have a country house that has a well. I have plenty of water. The water heating system is “hot water on demand” meaning that the furnace heats the water as it is used rather than storing it hot in large tank.
I like my hot showers but because of the capacity limitation of hot water on demand I have to use a low-flow showerhead, not to save water but to assure a hot shower.
I found that the Oxygenics showerhead is excellent as a low-flow showerhead. I got it expecting to be disappointed based on the claims advertised. It actually provides a nice shower while using very little water. If you have to use a low-flow showerhead I recommend it.
A low-flow toilet may take more than 1 flush (2 is the max I’ve had to use, so far… and that was just 1 time) for solid waste, but I would venture a bet that people tend to do “Number 1” more often than “Number 2” (if you’re putting any kind of liquids into your body, during the course of a day). So 1 flush would be more than acceptable, most of the time.
This is EXACTLY the problem. I don’t particularly want to drink water that contains colonies of E.Coli in it. So, the water needs to be treated. Treating water costs money. Treating water with certain contaminants costs even more money.
We are not exactly dealing with an unlimited resource here. Unfortunately, people probably won’t be understanding this until it costs an arm-and-a-leg to treat their water.
We need to add the word yet, after that first comma in this post, Gorsnak. That is the critical point. There are some chemicals that make it into water sources that are a real pain to remove (read: kinda expensive); one example would be nitrates. Yeah, this chemical can be removed from water, but not very easily.
The second sentence of this post is, consequently, what we need to focus on. If people don’t seem to really care about their health, let’s appeal to their wallets.
If you’re going to say “it takes more time to get clean”, then I recommend buying a low-flow showerhead to try out. If it takes you more than 1-2 minutes longer to shower with a low-flow showerhead, you’re using something wrong.
Good points, GorillaMan.
If the dirt needed to be treated (read: needed lead, nitrates, etc. extracted from it), then your analogy would work. But seeing as how we don’t consume dirt (or at least, shouldn’t), there’s no comparison.
In summary: I don’t know if people just generally view water treatement as “boiling water to remove contaminants” or “they just run it through a filter”… but I can assure you that treating water is not that straightforward. Potable water is not an unlimited resource (there are some chemicals that, at this point, cannot be feasibly extracted from water). As such, why is there any debate* over whether or not low-flow is a good idea?!
LilShieste
*- since this thread seems to be taking on a more GD feel than GQ, I wonder if it should be moved…
Sometimes the way the plumbing is laid out can have an effect on this, and make low-flow showerheads all but unuseable. About 25 years ago our local water utility passed out low flow showerheads to every house and said we had to use them. I should say that the showers in my parents’ house had always taken forever to warm up, like about four minutes at the minimum. We dutifully installed the lowflow heads, and now it took about 10 minutes for the hot water to come. There was a button on the showerhead that you were supposed to press to stop the flow while you were lathering up, and we dutifully tried to use that. Switch the flow back on, and…SURPRISE!! the hot water that you waited so long to get…is gone! And you had to wait another five minutes to get hot water to rinse off. There’s no way you can get people to accept that, and if you point out the needs of a growing population, maybe it’s time to consider limiting that growth.
We put the old heads back on after about half a day. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure that every other place I’ve lived since had lowflow plumbing, and it’s been fine.
My take on it was that ruadh was making an elliptical reference to using the high flow showerhead for clitoral stimulation, and that it was a joke. However, I’ve been wrong before.
Got it in one, neuroman.
Carry on …
As a resident of Phoenix may I say:
BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
I don’t want to go on a rant in an inappropriate forum but visitors to Phoenix rarely get the impression that water conservation is severely enforced. City provided flood irrigation for lawns is the norm in older neighborhoods and the region is lousy with golf courses, manmade lakes, fountains and swimming pools. A good indicator is that Maricopa county is a hotspot for West Nile virus while Pima county where Tucson is located has virtually no human cases. We have plenty of places for mosquitos to breed. At any rate drought restrictions are not the norm in Phoenix.
What make and model do you all use? Seriously, more often than not I have to flush at least 2 times. Maybe I need to change my diet or something. Lieu could probably make pile of dough consulting on such things.
I can actually give you a reviews for two brands based on my house! I had the downstairs toilet replaced when we moved in, and I had the upstairs one put in six months later by a different plumber. The downstairs one, a basic Eljer 1.6 gallon model, is disappointing. It does often require two flushes to get even a fairly modest amount of solids down. The upstairs one is a Mansfield, and it works beautifully, no matter what. They’re both round-front, and they look very similar, but the difference in function is amazing.