Las Vegas water usage versus any other city

Low flow toilets.... god... how does it save water to have to flush more than once...

and the new toilets with the "power flush" tend to explode...

I do like the newer toilets with the "dual flush" option. one for the light duty and one for the heavy stuff

water saver shower heads...2 gallons per minute shower head...works fine...

Landscaping is one of the biggest consumers... the only good thinkg about water for landscaping is that its is returning the water to mother earth...

 

your "NIMBY" comment is what prompted me to say what I said.. not mean to be rude...

One vote at a time...

 

got it....

 

The solution for water is the same as fuel.
Tax the crap out of it, and pretend that you're going to use the generated revenue for water sourcing.

It really doesn't matter what you do with the money, the real conservation will occur when people have to start paying for the stuff.

Suddenly watering lawns, washing off driveways, and making golf courses supernaturally green will not seem to be quite as important. Interestingly enough...many of the places where water is scarce has sunshine in abundance. This presents an interesting possibility if you can keep the evil, money grubbing, lying politicians from looting the water tax.
Build some solar farms or wind turbine fields instead and use the resulting power to distill or desalinate.

 

If you frequently have to flush more than once, you have a terrible toilet design. Or maybe even something wasn't actually 'designed', just quickly cobbled together to get something to market, as many early models were. Replace it with something that actually has some hydraulic engineering put into it.

I read up on various flush performance tests before replacing the toilets in my house, not quite a decade ago. The model I acquired performs much better than any previous toilet in any dwelling I had ever lived in -- quick, powerful, clean flush with virtually no backspray. And even if someone wants to flush it twice (based on some mythology about modern appliances not sending enough water down the sewer to adequately push along the solids), it still saves significant water. (The previous units were rated 3.5 gpf, but after the worn internal parts had been replaced, my measurements at the meter found one was taking 4.5 gpf, the other 5 gpf.)

This model is also entirely gravity feed, no pressure tank to explode.

And if Greg suffers from water saving shower heads, once again, I recommend better shower heads. Some work much better than others. And for me, the energy savings at the hot water heater was more important than the water savings.

 

Actually I don't suffer from anything like that. We don't have any water-saving mandates here that force anyone to scrimp on water. Some of the big hotel chains were promoting their water-saving plumbing for awhile, but I think they quietly dropped it after they discovered they were losing business because of it.

I'm not really seeing the downside of our present rate of water consumption. We take out a portion of the river's flow, use it and pump it out into large evaporation ponds. The rivers don't seem to be suffering. The sludge is scraped up and spread back on the land. The people who advocate cutting our consumption are very passionate and committed about it, but they can't seem to provide a rational set of arguments to support it. It seems to be another house of cards of cross-referenced assertions and assumptions.

 

"If pipelines were built, it could make every place greener and people wouldn't have to suffer with dry yards, low-flow toilets or water-saver shower heads."

I live in the US southwest. The region is tapping its deep groundwater, which on the time scales we care about is to a large degree non-renewable.

I am a fan of low-flow shower heads, but I have to admit that my motivation was to reduce heating.

 

With a lot more water, being consumed by much fewer people, most of Canada is not (yet) facing the same problems as much of the U.S. But if hotels were losing business because of their water-saving appliances, that was driven more by poor equipment selection than by any inherent problem with water conservation. As I pointed out earlier, teething problems with some of our early low-water appliances were addressed by bringing in some real fluid engineering, resulting in products quite superior to what existed in our old water wasting days.

Don't forget the energy needed to heat that shower water. Even for most of the U.S., that energy is more costly than the water itself. And that won't change until people put in more solar water heat.

And even some parts of Canada already have reason to be concerned about water volumes flushed down toilets. Victoria doesn't put its sewage into ponds, but dumps it straight into the Strait of Juan de Fuca with only 'primary treatment', nothing more than a 2-inch screen to snag the biggest pieces of paper and fabric. And since Victoria is three-fourths surrounded by U.S. waters, that means their poo is floating into our San Juans and Puget Sound. We've been ragging on them about this crap for decades, trying to force them into better treatment.

Since a sewage treatment plant more advanced than their simple concrete drain pipe costs actual money, they would benefit from water conservation that keeps down the size of the needed treatment plant.

 

I want to back up what fuzzy said. There are quite a number of low flow and even high flow toilets designed to have NASCAR races of the "vehicles" with the losers going to the pit and the winners ready for the next race. All the flow energy goes into lots of circular race action. When replacing the toilets in my bathrooms I really did my home work to find what works. The Toto was the winner. It's only 1.2 gallon per flush but its a shocker of how much differently they work. All the energy goes into a straight down path carrying everything at really fast speed. Simply put, there are two flush designs out in the world...Poor and Great. The problem with the loser toilets you observe is they are poorly designed, not that too little water is provided.

 

^^ Mine are Toto Drake models from the 1.6 gallon era, pulling closer to 1.5 gallon on my water meter. Yes, the water and load go nearly straight down with a gentle whoosh, with almost no energy diverted to spinning and backspray.

Years after installing these, I was astounded to be working in a brand new corporate building complex, of a major international company, with very noisy new toilets producing by far the worst backspray I'd ever experienced. Someone didn't check performance before ordering several hundred units. Whoever started that old warning about not hanging toothbrushes in the bathroom because of germy toilet spray, must have had a similarly spraying toilet.

 

Are you sure they were not bidets? The building staff might not have known the difference.

 

Just curious....what are the "numbers" associated with producing a desalinization plant converting the Pacific Ocean, for example, into fresh water for southern California? How much does a desalinization plant cost? How much fresh water does it produce? How much electricity would it use? How much does it cost to produce a gallon of fresh water from salt water?

 

^^ Here is a wikipedia article with some energy figures: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Energy_consumption
Two sections down are some cost figures.

 

I should have guessed there would be a wikipedia article......Thanks for the link....one takeaway for me:

Supplying all domestic water by sea water desalination would increase the United States' energy consumption by around 10%, about the amount of energy used by domestic refrigerators

I would have guessed that producing fresh water would have been far more expensive and energy intensive.

 

We have a big desal plant here in Tampa Bay. I've toured the facility and here are a couple of first hand observations:
1) It is only run when the natural water sources (ground water and river runoff) limits have been reached. Those limits are set by environmental restrictions, so the desal usage is extremely dependent on year round rain accumulation.
2) The desal plant can only be run when the adjacent power plant is running. I thought that the power plant proximity was to supply power, but the reason is very different, the power plant cooling water circulation from Tampa Bay must be in operation to prevent excessive salinity in the bay. The power plant is needed as a water "mixer", not a power source.
3) The purity of the water coming out of the desal plant is too high. Minerals and impurities must be added to prevent the public from complaining about the "taste" of the water changing when coming from the desal plant.

 

Interesting that they even need one in Florida. I would have thought that Florida gets enough rain. And the water is TOO pure so they have to add impurities? Interesting factoid too.

Interesting read about the Tampa plant:
http://www.tampabaywater.org/tampa-bay-seawater-desalination-plant.aspx

 

One of the "nice" things about Florida is we have a really hard time stealing water from some other state. So our past history of pumping the FL aquifer dry required addressing the self inflicted water shortage head on. The core problem was a past culture of wasting it intensely. The most effective response was creating a "reclaimed water" distribution system to supply sprinkler water to many high use facilities and neighborhoods. All our sewer water is sprayed right back into our yard (after a slight detour). The second most effective response was to apply a lot of mandatory watering restrictions. There is still a long way to go, but the idea that water is "plentiful" in Florida has been overcome to some degree.

 

The sinkholes may have help with that.