I don’t think it could cost any more than if you were home for those two weeks.
Before we moved into our last house, we noted that there was no floor drain in the basement, where the water heater and furnace were located. Seemed like a disaster waiting to happen, so we had a tankless water heater installed. Got a nice energy rebate on the taxes that year for it, and the payback in energy costs was estimated at five years or so.
Having lived in Africa, I have to smile at first-world plumbing issues. In one town we visited, everyone walked in the middle of the streets because the pissoirs were on the second floors of the buildings and drained directly onto the street and into “benjo” ditches. In fact, sewage in most areas (unless you were wealthy) was in open-air ditches.
I had my house retrofitted for this and I love it. In my case I have a raised foundation house with all of the plumbing underneath in the crawlspace. The pipes are insulated and I am in Santa Barbara where it doesn’t get very cold.
My gas bills are around $15/month higher this summer. I am not how much of this is the plumbing system and how much is the giant increase in gas prices over the last year.
OP here. As I posted above, the questions I asked in the OP were answered in the first three replies. The majority of the rest of the thread has been about other aspects of European plumbing mostly unrelated to anything I was asking about.
I’m a little tired of being pinged by irrelevant (to me) new posts to this thread, so I’m setting my notification status to Normal and will be ignoring it henceforth. As far as I’m concerned, the mods can close it, but if others here want it to continue, I guess that’s okay.
Thanks again to the Dopers who answered my questions.
We don’t normally close threads. Setting the notification status to Normal should remove the pinging. If you still get unwanted notifications from this thread you can set it to Muted.
I would suggest that the pump be tied to the light or fan switch for the bathroom. That gives the pump a half a minute or so head start on most demands to use the hot water, which should be sufficient to save a lot of water. I see Insulating the pipes as more awkward than expensive, depending on how accessible they are. (You can buy lengths of foam pipe insulation at Home Depot)
OTOH, if the pump system is a retrofit, then there’s going to be a lot of tearing open walls anyway.
Yes, I recall a trip to Africa (Tanzania) and the major concern was storing enough water to get through until the next seasonal monsoons. There were a lot of giant plastic agricultural tanks for collecting rainwater. Those stories of villagers who have to walk miles to a useable water source are not too far off the mark. The idea that we have water that’s drinkable out of the tap, and essentially unlimited, is a weird luxury for most.
I grew up in West Africa and if you had opened one door of our American-style fridge, you would have seen a whole shelf of gin bottles.
they did not contain gin but boiled water. Gin bottles were ideal because they had snap-on lids,
Where, if I may ask? We were posted to Mali and to Uganda. In both places we had pretty skookum water purifiers to kill the nasties like giardia. Villagers not lucky enough to have a well often had to hike long distances for water, and it was likely contaminated with nasty things like guinea worm (now pretty much eradicated). Well-meaning NGOs went to Africa and drilled wells in villages, but they didn’t train anyone in the maintenance or repairs, and left no spare parts, so when the wells eventually conked out, they were useless.
As for toilets, the ones in the houses that the Embassy leased were American standard and connected to city water. But traveling to villages was not for the faint-hearted when it came to toilet facilities. We used one in Dogon country that was so rank it made me gag.
We were in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Bear in mind that this was shortly after WW2.
On the “Well-meaning NGOs”. There was a scheme to provide farmers with tractors and several dozen were funded. A year later, when they went to see how much the farmers’ lives had been improved by the new equipment, they found the tractors rusting away in the fields where they had run out of fuel.
I would bet money that the building was built before toilets were in the apartments and when the bathtub was in the kitchen. My mother-in-law lived lived in the same apartment for so long it was rent- controlled until she died in 1994. The [ bathtub] was in the kitchen , like this photo (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/12/dining/small-nyc-apartments-kitchens.html) and the toilet was down the hall.
so you put your food and drinks in the same bowl you fill with mud and piss?
Yes. But not at the same time, obviously. And I don’t usually piss in the bidet.
The outside of a beer or wine bottle is not exactly sterile as they’re exposed to far more nasties in the warehouse. Run a UV light over a few bottles and I’ll guarantee you’ll see some rat piss.