Australian Water Use

[woodbe]

The point I am trying to make is that a 100 gallon tank is only going to serve to make your sense of pride feel a little better, your wallet a lot lighter and apart from that pretty much bugger all else.

From http://www.savewater.com.au/index.php?sectionid=200 :

If the 5 million homes connected to mains water around Australia each had a 1,000 litre water tank, 5GL (5 Billion Litres) of water would not have to be taken from the environment every year'

I think the point is that domestic use is a relatively small user of water, so even a 1000 litre tank would make a significant impact to total domestic consumption. Don't forget that during the rain season, the tank could remain full most of the time, so the net effect is far more than 1 x 1000 litres.

woodbe.

[Iain]

And a 1000 litre tank is only going to be used for the garden, hardly worth hooking up to the house.

[Howdya do that]

Hey Woodbe,
I bet you have a nice garden with flowers and lawn that you irrigate, How many people does that feed and clothe?
Do you recycle your tail water?
Do you know your own water use efficiency rate?
Agricultural production in NSW continues to exceed the rate of population growth depite irrigation entitlements continually being reduced by governments.

the federal government's 2001 State of the Environment report calculated that the Sydney Water Corporation released 548 GL of wastewater, and 420 GL of stormwater to the sea in one year.

Do you wear cotton underpants?
Are you hungry yet?

[echnidna]

I wonder if in preparing statistics of agricultural water use that the evaporation and leakage from open channels (which is around 90%) has been included as "agricultural" use.

This distorts the true agricultural water usage statistics.

It is water lost due to obsolete delivery systems.
This is the responsibility of governments who continue to shirk their role.

I contend if open channels were piped or covered there wouldn't be a water shortage.

[woodbe]

And a 1000 litre tank is only going to be used for the garden, hardly worth hooking up to the house.

Actually, in SA at least, the tank rebate involves plumbing into the house and some sort of switchover mechanism. It is directly targetted at Mr Joe and Jane Public. No plumbing = no rebate. The desired impact definitely seems to be to replace some domestic consumption with tank water.

woodbe.

[woodbe]

Hey Woodbe,
I bet you have a nice garden with flowers and lawn that you irrigate, How many people does that feed and clothe?
Do you recycle your tail water?
Do you know your own water use efficiency rate?
Agricultural production in NSW continues to exceed the rate of population growth depite irrigation entitlements continually being reduced by governments.

the federal government's 2001 State of the Environment report calculated that the Sydney Water Corporation released 548 GL of wastewater, and 420 GL of stormwater to the sea in one year.

Do you wear cotton underpants?
Are you hungry yet?

C'mon, please don't make this personal. I have already said that I've been doing my bit, and no water-hungry garden. Agapanthas are very hardy

How do you work out your water use efficiency rate?

woodbe.

[Howdya do that]

C'mon, please don't make this personal. I have already said that I've been doing my bit, and no water-hungry garden. Agapanthas are very hardy

How do you work out your water use efficiency rate?

woodbe.

Value of production divided by quantity of water used.
There's nothing personal about it. It just gets right up my nose that so many people read or hear figures like you have and what the water produces and provides is forgotten.
A farmer is a business man and if he's not he's not going to be a farmer for long, Ask yourself this question
Would any business man spend more money or use more resources producing his product than he has to, to satisfy the market?

[SPIRIT]

2 bits worth

l think everbody has been slow on the whole water / envio thing we were all told years a like 10 that all this would happen peopels attatides don't change until they have to (like we have no water to water my roses) now we are told that the earth is going heat up and still we can't agree on how to do it MONEY playing such a big part
eg ..stop consuming so much everbody
glow your own food .catch your water .2hand things are ok

[Daddles]

glow your own food

Hmm, I thought this was an environmental post, but here he is telling us to NUKE our food

Richard

[SPIRIT]

dam my fat fingers , bugger the L not near the R

[woodbe]

Ask yourself this question
Would any business man spend more money or use more resources producing his product than he has to, to satisfy the market?

That's the point, isn't it. There is a trade off between money and resources. It costs a lot of money to make significant inroads in water use. So in your example, the business man may save money by using a cheap resource inefficiently.

An urban example. The car wash. It costs between $5 and $25 depending where you go, and the wash itself uses maybe 200 litres of water (guess, I have no idea really, but I can't imagine it's more than that) Water in SA costs just $1.09 per 1000 litres, so when the water per car wash costs just $0.20 where is the motivation to save it? Thankfully, the government has stepped in and forced water efficiency on the industry, but the major costs of the business would have to be wages, power and rent for land and machinery.

It's a competitive market, and the unit cost of production is a big single deciding factor for profit. Water doesn't cost enough to hit the business cost radar unless the business is using an awful lot of it.

Value of production divided by quantity of water used.

Well, ok. Not really applicable towards domestic circumstances, although our kids are priceless, so it's a bit hard to calculate

Note that this efficiency measure is dependant on market. I'd guess that the high water usage crops score well on it, but given that most of that stuff is exported, that's a bit like filling tankers with Aussie water and sending it overseas. Nice when we have excess water, but in times of shortage...

woodbe.

[SPIRIT]

so what is the answer do we keep saving water until there is none left to save or do we make it rain more

[ozwinner]

Time for everyone to do a rain dance.



Al

[SPIRIT]

a cloud just came over come on everybody dance

[DPB]

OK, I'm going to stick my neck out a country kilometer.

When I purchased my house, it had a swimming pool which holds about 20,000 litres of water. If I spent about $45,000, I could have it removed and the space re-landscaped, and perhaps that's what I will end up doing.

However, in the meantime, I and tens of thousands of pool owners are faced with a dilemma. Stage 4 water restrictions will only allow pool topping-up by bucket. The bucket must be filled at a tap, not by a hose.

Although I recently purchased a pool cover to minimise evaporation, the pool still looses about 10mm of water per week. Once the water level drops below the skimmer box, the filtration system will no longer function. I haven't started to top the pool with buckets yet, but it wouldn't surprise me if this took hundreds of bucket per week (if not more). If I can keep up, I may be able to keep the pool filtered and avoid stagnation, algae growth and mosquito infestation. But I can imagine that there will be many pool owners that won't or can't keep there pools maintained.

What are the potential health hazards of this?