Re: How much water / house?

How much water / house? (Score: 1)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-09-22 23:54 (#2SSR)

... An acre-foot is enough to supply two homes for a year.

Half an acre-foot is 162,926 gallons (per a couple of different online conversion programs). I'm in the Great Lakes area where we don't pay much for water and our house (two people) uses about 30,000 gallons/year. Even when we were watering a few new trees we only got to 40,000 gallons/year. We don't do anything special to conserve except the toilets are the low flush type and faucets/sinks have typical 2 gallons/minute aerators (flow restrictors).

What are they doing in San Diego to use 5x the water we use here?

Re: How much water / house? (Score: 1)

by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2014-09-23 01:33 (#2SSX)

our house (two people) uses about 30,000 gallons/year. Even when we were watering a few new trees we only got to 40,000 gallons/year

Two-people is a ridiculously small household, and you are in an area where you don't have to water your yard at all, where most of the Southwest you'd have nothing but dirt unless you water the whole thing twice a week.

Re: How much water / house? (Score: 1, Informative)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-09-23 02:46 (#2ST1)

Big difference between "water use" (measured by the house water meter) and "water footprint" (all the water used to produce goods consumed by a person). From the Wiki source, footnote [3] http://web.archive.org/web/20081004003759/http://www.ibisworld.com/pressrelease/pressrelease.aspx?prid=125

IBISWorld estimates that the typical single family home consumes 69.3 gallons of water per day.

69.3 x 365 = ~25,300 gallons/year. So OP is correct that 30,000 gal/year is reasonable in Great Lakes area with no special conservation efforts, and probably some limited watering during the summer if there is a temporary dry spell.

The San Diego number for a house (seems most likely based on actual metered usage) is very high, must be watering outside all the time? Anyone from the southwest care to share their water consumption and water bill?

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