A 50 MGD Answer for Atlanta
When you check the balance of your bank account and notice that your spending habits are causing a deficit to your savings, what is your first, logical response? You can either spend less and be smarter with the cash you have, or you can look for other sources of income, either earning or borrowing more money. Likely most of us would do the former, and conserve as much money as possible before resorting to trying to increase our supply.
The same holds true for our natural resources – especially water. We all know about the water crisis faced by Metro Atlanta – the impact is felt in every corner of the state. While the statewide water task force is considering demand side management (i.e. conservation) to reduce that water deficit, they are focusing much more effort on alternate strategies that include massive expansion of new reservoirs, transferring water between basins, and piping desalinated water from Savannah. But just as you would immediately spend less to stop your financial deficit, the approach to the water deficit shouldn’t start out as complicated or drastic either. When you can instantly start to implement demand side management, and you can pretty much guarantee the results, why would you not just begin that process straight away?
So far what has been presented by the water task force incorrectly shows that demand side management is not being very effective. Demand side management includes reducing leaks, replacing inefficient plumbing fixtures such as toilets, showerheads, and faucets, sub-metering multifamily water units, and conservation pricing (paying higher prices when you use more water). The above measures are indeed quite effective, and have immediate, measurable results.
Let’s look at just toilets, showerheads and faucets and I’ll show you just what sort of water savings we could see in Atlanta. The 10 County Metro Atlanta region has about 4 million people in it – and it’s pretty safe to say they all use the bathroom multiple times every day. Whether it is at home, the office, out shopping or anywhere in between, there are 4 million people flushing toilets multiple times a day, every day. How much water is that? Well, any toilet installed after 1992 use 1.6 gallons every time they flush (and are allowed to be called low-flow…). Pre-1992 toilets use between 3.5 and 5 gallons per flush (GPF) and its safe to say the mix in the city is around 50/50. The task force has looked at the impact of putting in standard toilets (1.6 gpf) in replacement of the oldest, inefficient toilets. That is like replacing an old SUV with a new pickup truck, when there is a hybrid available at the same price. Every toilet manufacturer makes toilets that use or average 1 gallon per flush – a 40% reduction over current standards and 70% less than the 2 million older toilets in the metro area use. By changing those existing toilets to high efficiency toilets alone would save 29 million gallons per day, every day for the foreseeable future.
Next are showers. A shower installed after 1992 can only use 2.5 gallons per minute (gpm) with older showerheads using double that. Let’s assume (or hope) that half the metro area would switch to the new showerheads available from all major manufacturer’s that use on average 1.6 gallons per minute. Based on an average shower length of 8 minutes, we would see additional savings of 15 million gallons per day (44 total).Third tap in faucets, which hopefully people are using after going to the bathroom, but also while shaving, brushing teeth and washing faces. That’s another 5 million gallons per day, for a total of 49 million gallons of water saved, just from switching to higher efficiency toilets, showerheads and faucet aerators – a change that I did in my own house in less than an hour, and I’m no plumber.
50 million gallons per day saved, every day, just by switching out the inefficient toilets, showerheads and faucets in our homes and offices. Even if only 50% get changed out, that’s still a savings of 25 million gallons per day of water – water that no longer has to be pumped, treated, chlorinated, wasted and then back and treated as wastewater (I won’t even get started on the hundred’s of thousands of dollars of energy savings that will result from such a switch).
Step one – require toilets that use on average 1 gallon. Step two – 1.75 gpm showerheads. Step three – 1.0 gpm faucets. Results – 50 million gallons per day saved, everyday, from here on out. It’s not rocket science.
The task forces estimates that only 35 MGD can be saved through demand controlled conservation measures – but you can nearly double that just through high efficiency toilets, showerheads and faucets. That doesn’t even take into account replacing leaking pipes, installing rain sensors on irrigation systems, imposing water restrictions, implementing a water efficiency pricing structures. Throw those measures into the mix and even being extremely conservative (no pun intended) there is no reason we can’t cut our water deficit by a third, solely from using water smarter.
These measures won’t erase the entire water deficit – but they will put a big dent in it. When we check out water savings account and see it plummeting, our first response shouldn’t be to call a neighbor for a loan or do something extraordinary to increase the supply, it should be to simply use what we have smarter.
Tags: water conservation, water in georgia
I’m hopeless with virtually any plumbing problems,only hope i possessed a little primary knowledge just to save cash with plumbers!