I am probably slightly off in my count but I think this is my 600th blog. I have a few older blog posts that don’t really count in my total for reasons that I won’t go into at this time). It all began in July 2006 with this post. The first 400 blogs or so were on Xanga. A little over a year ago I switched over to Blogspot full time (I was double posting on both sites for a short time) but the Xanga blogs are still out there. I began copying them over to this blog site but it was very time consuming and now (due to some changes at the Xanga site) it is even harder to do. I imagine it would take something like being laid off at work to allow me enough time to migrate them all. In the end, it is probably the case that only I care. OK, enough of this, on to blog #600 (ish).
Let me first start with a summary of my water bill for the last 12 months that I lived in Indiana. I have assembled the data in this easy to follow table for your convenience.
| Month | Billed Amount |
| October 2010 | $0.00 |
| November 2010 | $0.00 |
| December 2010 | $0.00 |
| January 2011 | $0.00 |
| February 2011 | $0.00 |
| March 2011 | $0.00 |
| April 2011 | $0.00 |
| May 2011 | $0.00 |
| June 2011 | $0.00 |
| July 2011 | $0.00 |
| August 2011 | $0.00 |
| September 2011 | $0.00* |
As you many have surmised, I did not pay for water at my home in Indiana. We were out in the country and we used well water. Now, there was some expense in paying for the electricity for the pump that brought us water out of the well and into our house but basically the water was free. This is not the case here in Texas.
For the city of McKinney, the water bill is combined with the sewer and trash / recycle pickup service. There are a few misc. surcharges thrown in and all in all my first to month’s bills were around $100 each. This month’s bill is actually higher than my electric and gas bill (they are combined too)! This sounded odd to me so I studied my water / sewage / trash / recycle bill for a clue. I was hoping that there would be some indicator as to why the bill was (in my opinion) so very high.
I grabbed my reading glasses (yes, I bought a pair of cheap reading glasses a while back) and looked for a clue. The only thing that I saw that was intriguing was my meter reading. For the time span of the bill, our house had used 10 units. I had no idea what that meant so I called the number on the bill for help.
I was met with the usual “press 1 for this, press 2 for that” prompts but there was not a “press X for help with what a unit is” so I opted for 0 and hoped for the best. The lady that answered was pleasant enough and explained to me that each unit represented 1,000 gallons of water. I did the math quickly in my head (I majored in math in college) and came to the conclusion that this meant we had used 10,000 gallons of water in the past month. To put this amount in perspective, a normal size swimming pool has roughly 20,000 gallons. This would mean that we would fill 6 swimming pools with our annual water use. Anyway, 10,000 seemed like a high number so I asked her if that was a normal amount for a family of four. She indicated that it was on the high end but within the normal range. Before we concluded our call she gave me a little advice. She noted that the sewage portion of the bill uses the months of December, January and February as a gauge of sorts. They figure that part of the water used in the summer months would be for watering the lawn but not so in the winter months. She indicated that if we conserved water in these coming months, it would help us out going forward with that portion of our bill. I thanked her for the advice but noted that we were likely going to move in February.
10,000 gallons! Even now that I have thought about it for a while, it still seems high. That is 330 gallons per day. That is about 14 gallons per hour. This almost a quart of water used every minute! I started to think about what we do that uses water. I did find this site that seemed interesting. After you punch in your daily water use it does a calculation for you. My inputs returned just over 200 gallons of water so something is not adding up here. Here is there estimates used when doing the calculations…
- Bath: 50 gallons
- Shower: 2.5 gallons per minute
- Teeth brushing: 1 gallon
- Hands/face washing: 1 gallon
- Face/leg shaving: 1 gallon
- Dishwasher: 20 gallons/load
- Dishwashing by hand: 5 gallons/load
- Clothes washing (machine): : 10 gallons/load
- Toilet flush: 3 gallons
- Glasses of water drunk: 8 oz. per glass (1/16th of a gallon)
The last one seems a little obvious and is a little overkill really. Does anyone drink so much water that it matters in the overall summation of their water use? Other than the kids taking longer showers that is necessary, I don’t think we overdo it really in any of the above areas. I suppose that the sprinklers could add a bit (they are set to go off in the middle of the night twice a week). At any rate, I think I will have to live with the 10 units that we use.
I did remove the trash / recycle part of the bill and calculated that each gallon of water costs us $0.009 (just less than a penny) so even saving a gallon here or there is not going to give me much of a monetary savings.
Looking back at my first blog, its subject only came up due to water issues at a house we had at the time. It seems I have not made much progress in 6 years of blogging.
Jon
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