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Water usage goal
Nov. 15th, 2008 02:26 pmStudying my water usage, and doing various reading, has led me to a method of determining a water usage goal for my household. I had not thought about this previously, but it makes sense and feels "right". Only use the amount of water that falls on your property! This is a serious simplification of a truly complex problem, but seems like a reasonable place to start.
I have a 10,000sqft lot. Davis gets 17" of rain a year. So 105,000 gallons of rainwater falls out of the sky onto my property each year. In a previous post I disclosed that my household used 168,000 gallons last year. So I imported 63,000 gallons of water.
This has to stop!
The lawns are history!
It's not really that simple, but my lawns do use alot of water. A rough guess is that a lawn in Davis uses 2" of water per week for 3 months of the year. Assuming that I have 4000sqft of lawn, that means that I use 60,000 gallons of water just to keep my lawns green. This seems like the easiest place to start on reducing water usage. Now to figure out how to do it without letting my yard turn into a soggy mud pit every winter.
I have a 10,000sqft lot. Davis gets 17" of rain a year. So 105,000 gallons of rainwater falls out of the sky onto my property each year. In a previous post I disclosed that my household used 168,000 gallons last year. So I imported 63,000 gallons of water.
This has to stop!
The lawns are history!
It's not really that simple, but my lawns do use alot of water. A rough guess is that a lawn in Davis uses 2" of water per week for 3 months of the year. Assuming that I have 4000sqft of lawn, that means that I use 60,000 gallons of water just to keep my lawns green. This seems like the easiest place to start on reducing water usage. Now to figure out how to do it without letting my yard turn into a soggy mud pit every winter.
