Armed Polite Society
Main Forums => The Roundtable => Topic started by: AZRedhawk44 on October 01, 2021, 02:54:44 PM
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I don't typically look very closely at my utilities bills, but for some reason or other I looked at my water utilization more closely from last month's bill. Evidently my water meter registered 19,000 gallons going through it. A quick google search indicates that each person in a household generally "should" account for about 3000 gallons a month. There's only 3 of us in my house.
I will admit my house lot is a little larger than average, close to 1/3 of an acre. And I have 4 large pine trees each over 30 feet tall, 2 more pine trees planted a few years ago working on catching up to their buddies, and two other deciduous (an ash and something else I can't remember). I have one patch of grass about 900sq ft or so, then another one on the other side of the house about 400sq feet or so. I have a water softener. Our 250sq ft garden produces food 9 months of the year, even through the summer.
I have had a "hot slab" leak in the past, that I only discovered because my dog liked to lay on the heated tile it was creating. I've had that fixed, but I wonder if I might have a cold water line broken in the foundation that I don't know about. Or is my water usage just gluttonously average for a larger than average lot in the desert southwest, with 8 trees and 1200+sq ft of grass and a garden?
I'm having little luck finding online water calculators. I've found this from the city of Mesa for calculating grass water consumption, intended for HOAs. https://apps.mesaaz.gov/WaterCalculator/ It seems to suggest that my 1200sq ft of grass should be consuming 5-6k gallons of water a month through the summer, so between that and a ~250sq ft garden and the 8 trees, perhaps I'm not too grotesque in my residential water use?
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How does it compare to your historic average usage?
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How does it compare to your historic average usage?
The lowest I've seen is 9000 gallons, and this month's was the highest I've ever seen at 19,000 gallons. 9k was in the winter, and 17-18k is pretty typical for summers. They also only read in whole 1k increments, so it's possible for the meter to show a high month because the dial didn't flip to the next integer on the last reading. 17-18 is pretty common for me in the summers. 9k is abnormally low, typical winter reading is around 11k. We probably had the garden turned off that month and irrigation really low.
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19K gallons for three people in a residential setting with irrigation and a garden sounds about right. I just paid our bill and we were at 18kgal (two people, full irrigation twice a week plus one weekend hit to the back yard, 4-6 loads of laundry, two average-length showers total per day).
You already pinpointed one issue, the garden. Throwing a hose in the garden for a couple of hours uses a surprising amount of water. How many loads of laundry do you do a week? How many showers total per day and how long in the shower? Irrigation system? I figure you've already done the numbers, but if you haven't, irrigation usage is as simple as heads times GPM and multiply by minutes of use. Doesn't take long for the numbers to add up.
Easy to check for leaks, though. Shut off everything in the house. Mark the meter reading, then go back and loot at it in 30-60 minutes. Do it multiple times to make sure you don't catch something like a softener cycle. You shouldn't see any usage at all. At most, maybe a gallon or two to account for weeping toilet valves and such. Any more and you need to start looking for leaks.
Brad
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When I'm pumping water for irrigation out my pond, I'm at 700 gallons per hour, doesn't take that long to get to 30k gallons of water.