CONNECTING THE DOTS

Have you ever given any thought to the plumbing services connected with your home and their relationship to each other and to your wallet? When you do give a thought to your supply water service or sewer service, is it when the service cost increases? With so many costs increasing today, maybe thinking about and evaluating our water use and what it actually costs us would be a smart thing to do. So, with that being said, let’s start by acknowledging a couple of obvious cost relationships with water and sewer service. First, if you are using well water, you know first hand the direct relationship between the cost of electricity to power the well pump and your use of water. The more water you use the higher your electricity bill becomes. But, just about everyone that is supplied with water from a public or private utility usually expect water to flow from a faucet when turned on and don’t give a thought to the cost to supply that water to that faucet. In fact, it’s been said that the average person in the United States uses between 80 to 100 gallons of water per day, which is a lot of times turning that faucet on and off each day.

The costs to get that utility water to that faucet range from accessing the water source, transporting the water to the water treatment facility, treating the water to government mandated water quality levels, and finally safely pumping/piping the water to your home. Those processes require an expensive infrastructure consisting of, at least here in the Mother Lode foothills, Dams, flumes, conveyance ditches, storage tanks, treatment facilities, pumps, piping, meters, valves, trucks, maintenance equipment along with the personnel to actually make all of this work efficiently everyday, 24 hours a day. I think that you can easily see that getting water to flow from that faucet of yours is not an inexpensive undertaking. So, the more water you use, the more money is expended to get that water delivered to you. But wait, there’s another connection/relationship that we haven’t brought into the equation, and that is the fact that, the more water you use, the more wastewater will be drained into the sewage system. Of course this does not apply for water that you use to water your yard, but on a whole, the more water you use, the more wastewater will go down the drain.

What many people forget about is that conserving water not only saves on water fees, but they will also be saving on sewer and energy costs. Another thing that is hard to understand is how water, sewer and energy fees vary so wildly around the U. S., state to state, city to city and even in the same city. If you looked at studies which show water and sewer rates, city by city, you would probably be thinking the same as me that “This makes no sense!” I was also surprised to find that sewer rates in many areas are 2 to 4 times as much as water rates. Using a lot of hot water will also cost you money, not only for the water used, but also the energy (gas or electricity) to heat that water. So, I think you can see the relationship between water use and your wallet. The more water we use the more the utilities need to work on providing those water, sewer and energy services, which will ultimately result in the rates to provide those services to increase. Are you ready to examine and re-evaluate your water usage now?