Water Water Water

[kevin_standlee]

As I said when we had the leaking water main fixed last week, I'll be interested in seeing the impact on the water bill. Today the current cycle (ending March 24 and thus before we fixed the leak) bill arrived: 4000 units. (I don't know what the units represent.) Now we have a baseline against which we can measure whether or not we were leaking all along.

Comments

[erikvolson.livejournal.com]

In the US home market, the usual metering unit is the cubic foot, which works out to 7.48 US gallons, commercial units are 100 cubic feet, 748 gallons. This comes from the usual reservoir storage unit, the acre-foot (one acre of water, one foot deep) which is 43,560 cubic feet.

4000 cubic feet is a *lot* of water, just shy of 30,000 gallons. Average use is roughly 1500-3000 gallons a month per person in a US household. I'm completely not surprised that a leak can go through that much water. One gallon per minute is 43,200 gallons every 30 days, and 1gpm is not a very big flow of water at all.

This is assuming your units are standard. You can look at the water meter and see if it says "cubic feet" on it.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Ah, thank you, that's helpful. I didn't know those things.

Looking at our past bills, usage has been 4000-5000 units/month. (They only seem to bill in 1000-unit increments.) Two people, no lawn or garden or other water-hungry things shouldn't be using 30,000 gallons/month! I really hope to see a significant drop next month.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

For comparison: our ration here (Santa Cruz, CA, where the water comes from the local watershed) is 10 units (commercial cubic feet, as erikvolson described) for up to a four-person household. (just snipped a couple paragraphs of local drought neepery that does not apply to Fernley, to save your eyes).