To flush or not to flush
September 22, 2008
Posted by CindyW in : Green Journal , trackback
With a big smile on her face, the weather woman announced, “It’s going to be another gorgeous day tomorrow, sunny and high in the…” I grumbled, “Urgh.” Enough of this daily sunshine business, I want this:
You probably think I am nuts. Perhaps I am.
Or maybe there is a good reason for my craziness – it has not rained since April. Yes, it’s been 5 months since we saw the last rain drop. We are merely 10 miles from the Pacific coast and hundreds of miles away from a desert.
Sure the rainy-winter-dry-summer pattern is fairly typical in the bay area. This year however it has been quite extreme. In the winter it barely rained in the Sierra mountains where we source our water. We officially entered a drought a few months ago.
Desperate times call for desperate measures.
We take military showers. The kids get a weekly bath and a 30 second rinse every other day. Our lawn has turned somewhat yellow. Still, there are plenty places to cut water consumption.
For some reason toilet flushing gets my attention. The good clean potable water from the Sierra mountains drain into the sewer many many many times a day. That just doesn’t seem right. So I decided to flush every other pee and instructed the kids to do the same.
Soon husband discovered our trick and he wasn’t on board with the idea, “that’s disgusting.”
“Got better ideas?” I asked.
We put a gallon milk jug (filled with liquid) in each toilet tank to reduce the volume of water per flush – our homemade low flow system.
Ever the greedy one, I added another half gallon jug in each tank and broke our system. You see, we live on a street with quite a few mature trees that have extended their strong and numerous tentacles into our pipes.
Toilet paper forms clumps resulted from our homemade low flow flushing system, apparently ½ gallon too weak. $450 and one hour of Rotor Rooter service later, milk jugs came out of the tanks.
Shucks!
Well, now you will probably tell me to go without TP, like Crunchy Chicken and many others have done. Honestly, I am just not there yet. I have some mental blocks that need to be worked on. Meanwhile…
I started eyeing the water from the kids’ weekly bath. It has served to flush one toilet for a whole week.
And I have gone back to less than one flushing per pee and husband is sort of getting used to the idea. Just goes to show “normal” is all about what one is used to.
What we really need is a gray water system that collects water from our showers, baths, vegetable wash, and hand rinse. It can be used for watering the garden and flushing the toilet. If you have a gray water system, I’d love to hear how you rigged it up.
While I have been refining my nutty flushing scheme, more and more neighbors have started rock gardens, artificial turf and native draught-resistant yards.
Every quarter, our small city reminds people to water their yard only during the cool hours – early morning and late evening.
I, am writing a letter to my city and ask for a more steeply graduated water charge – keep the must have gallons cheap, raise the discretionary gallons to five times as expensive, and beyond that make it prohibitive. Hey, I think it is only fair that people get charged a LOT if they choose to water their 10,000 square foot lawn every day.
Yup, I am nuts.
Oh one other thing. Here is my pet peeve. To those who flush their toilets before using, stop it! What? the water in the toilet is too dirty for your pee?
CindyW at Organicpicks
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Comments»
Cindy, I live where there is plenty of water, but I’m with you- why should we flush away so much good pure water, the same quality that we drink? It just seems so wastful, and, of course, runs up our water bill. We catch our shower warmup water for flushing. We don’t flush as often in the master bath (which no one sees except my husband and I). We also use our dehumidifier water to water my flowers. We don’t water grass. Yes, the grass goes brown and dormant for a little while mid-summer, but it has already greened back up nicely now that the rain has come back and it’s cooler.
I can’t imagine going so long without rain! I just don’t know how you guys raise all that wonderful produce there under those conditions!
April? I guess we did have a very brief shower then but it has been since early March that we had a good drench. I just came back from a tour of a farm that has grassfed cattle in Napa. They had to ship all their cattle out to pastures bordering the coast because there is simply nothing for them to eat. Even then, the owner said they would come back “very lean” and by that she meant “downright skinny.”
As to the grey water system, I think one of those would be awesome. We’ve not come up with one though my husband was going to try to rig something up from the washer. He’s been too busy lately so maybe some day. I’ll have to check back to see if anyone’s done that.
Water is such a precious commodity here and, personally, I think rain barrels are pretty worthless because we go SO long without any rain.
Check out http://www.greywater.com/ which provides fairly detailed analysis on planning a grey water system.
http://www.thenaturalhome.com/greywater.html provide information on parts needed for a grey water system and some helpful schematic.
http://www.greenbuilder.com/sourcebook/Greywater.html has some additional considerations.
We decided on rain barrels instead of grey water, since we get regular rain where we live
Joyce: We rely much on the snowpack in the Sierra mountains for commercial and residential water usage. But it is very energy intensive to transport the water long distance.
During a recent conference, I learned that San Diego was considering desalination of seawater rather than transporting and fighting for water rights from the Sierra. Yeah, it is that expensive.
Water is one of the reasons that some people argue that local Californian rice isn’t as environmentally sound as say rice from India. I can see the arguement.
With such an urgent situation, I don’t understand why our water is not more expensive or why many of us still water our lawn daily.
GB: I agree that rain barrels are not practical here. On the way back from Yosemite, we passed by a logging mill. At 105 degrees, it was spraying water on hundreds of logs, ALL DAY LONG! Needless to say I was flabbergasted.
Cindy, though we get the rain, we actually get our household water from the Mahomet Aquifer, which has always been a wonderful source. However, the local people have actually declined to put in corn ethanol plants because they were concerned about how much water would have to come out of the aquifer. I think we all need to be concious of water usage.
I’m from the Bay Area as well, and going to college in Minnesota. It’s a hard adjustment — sometimes I feel like ‘the weather gods’ hate me, when it rains every other day here, but at home there isn’t enough water and yet people use so much of it. I don’t understand why people don’t GET it, that no water is no water and they shouldn’t be watering their lawns (what use is a lawn anyway??).