Not quite going with the flow
The city assures us that there will be enough water around here for the next 50 years, and maybe there will, but I’m not the sort of person who really wants to put such a claim to the test, especially since I’m paying for some of that water and using somewhere around 25,000 gallons a year myself.
I concede, though, that worrying about the water table in 2060 wasn’t my main concern when I started working on the toilet this week: it seemed to me that it was running a little longer than it needed to be, and such a situation can’t possibly save me money, so I opened up the mysterious porcelain tank and started screwing with stuff.
Apart from one brief spritzing in the face from an accidental disconnection without the shutoff completely shut off — don’t even ask — things went fairly well, and in the process of checking for leaks, I tweaked the refill-height adjustment to the tune of about ½ inch, which seems to reduce the fill time by several seconds and the water consumption by some fraction of a percentage point. I don’t expect this to make much of a difference in my utility bill, but I’d just as soon not be wasting the stuff, on the off-chance that I might want a drink on my 107th birthday.
Jeffro »
8 November 2009 · 6:48 pm
Shouldn’t Al Gore award you a carbon certificate or something?
CGHill »
8 November 2009 · 6:56 pm
I’m not doing this for Saint Al. I figure, any time I can do something that (1) is sparing of a natural resource and (2) doesn’t put ten grand in the hand of the man from Tennessee, it’s worth doing.
Jeffro »
8 November 2009 · 9:05 pm
I was just being a smart a$$. If the Ogallalah Aquifer keeps getting drained by irrigaters, there won’t be any water in this area. It’ll take more than finely tuned toilets to fix that problem – but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.
CGHill »
8 November 2009 · 9:34 pm
I’m wondering if there’s really anything we can do to recharge the aquifers. There’s a smallish one beginning in eastern Oklahoma City (Garber-Wellington) that supplies a lot of drinking water to the smaller towns. Flow is still good – up to 600 gal/min at some drilling points – but trace minerals are on the high side, and decent rainfall in the last two years hasn’t offset rising demand.
fillyjonk »
9 November 2009 · 7:17 am
Praying for rain and trying to keep the recharge areas from being paved over is all I can suggest.
Down here, we all get pretty uppity when someone suggests selling the water out of “our” aquifer (The Arbuckle-Simpson).
McGehee »
9 November 2009 · 11:33 am
Praying for rain seemed to work for Georgia.
A little too well maybe, but people are big on prayer in this neck of the woods.