My bathroom sink was draining slowly lately, and I finally remembered this during a time of day/week where I could _do_ something about it.
Normally I use a hooked wire and pull mats of hair and soap scum out, no big deal (we Wise mammals do shed a fair amount). But in _my_ sink, I find just a little bit of hair+scum and then a wall of... mycological FLESH, perhaps; a veritable _skin_ growing on my drain pipe. Horrible, horrible skin, with a curdling of hair and soap on its inner passage, like some demonic esophagus. ::shudder::
Speaking of horrific, thinking about water use and this foolish ad I saw for a lawn care service. In this ad, they said "you must water your lawn or it could die! And to resod could take $1,500! And your resale value is heavily tied to the green of your lawn!"
Forgetting for a moment the foolishness of the whole "lawn thing" in such an arid area as Texas, let's look at some assumptions.
We used 3,000 gallons of water in our last billing cycle. We don't water our outside unless things look really desperate.
We have some friends who used 15,000 gallons in their last cycle. Assuming that, for their larger household, they would normally use say 5,000 gallons indoors, that leaves 10,000 gallons of outdoors use.
The watering months, here, are perhaps from June through September -- four months. Lighter watering in other months, heaver perhaps in July and August, let's just average it out and say 10,000 gallons of lawn watering for four months.
The City of Austin rates are currently, for single-family residential customers, in dollars per thousand gallons:
0 - 2,000: $0.93 ($1.86 max)
2,001 - 9,000 $2.43 ($17.00)
9,001 - 15,000 $4.18 ($25.07)
15,001+ $7.63
So for this hypthotical household OF 15,000 gallons, the cost is (rounding up the thousand gallon deltas):
(0.93*2) + (2.43*7) + (4.18*6) = $43.95
Wastewater costs much more than water to process ($3.18 per 1,000 for the first 2,000, $7.18 per 1,000 thereafter), but these rates are calculated for the entire year given your winter water use, so they don't scale here.
Now, for a 5,000 gallon user (e.g. the sample family above without lawn watering) the numbers are:
(0.93*2) + (2.43*3) = $9.15
So, $34,80 per month for watering the lawn, times four months in the calculated period, is almost $140 a year. In eleven years, then, you will have saved enough to re-turf your lawn.
I know our water bill is in fact about nine dollars a month, for about three thousand gallons. Talking around, I'm hearing about water bills for $200 or more, though -- these must include the sewage fees and random fees that are tacked on throughout any given bill.
I was expecting the heavy lawn watering to cost more that $40 -- more like $100 -- which would give $300 to $400 a year in lawn watering costs, the saving of which would pay for a re-turfing in just four years or so (about the time it would take for the lawn to really die a lot).
Anyway, I still don't water my lawn. Instead, I'm aggressively converting it into non-grass coverings.
Posted by Edwin at July 6, 2008 12:21 PM