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by willthames
4326 days ago
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That seems insane! I know Australia is a bit more used to drought but it does seem to do astonishingly better at water conservation. My water bill tells us our water consumption is 200L per day, or 100L per person. Brisbane average is 400L per day per household. Let's assume our house is very conservative and twice as good as average and everyone else is using 200L per person per day - that's around 7 times better than the 360G (1362L) per day in California [1]! A 20% reduction seems completely unambitious on that scale. Most of the solutions seem to be around water conservation (low flow toilets, showers and taps, water tanks, water efficient washing machines and dishwashers) and education (have showers lasting no more than 5 minutes, no baths). Usage-based water bills were also used to drive down consumption, but it's now got to a point where 75% of our bill is fixed access costs - as people consumed less water, the access costs increased! [1] http://blogs.kqed.org/lowdown/2014/01/23/how-much-water-do-c... |
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I wanted to emphasize that, if it's what I think it is. I saw a TV show about Australian property (one of those shows that follow a couple trying to buy a house). One startling thing was seeing houses there with large, multi-thousand liter water storage tanks along the side of the house. I assume these collect rainwater.
Is that what you're talking about? If so, that's quite uncommon in the USA. I've seen older houses that had a way to store rainwater collected from the roof into a cistern in the basement. But that sort of thing just is not done here in new construction.
The problem in the USA is people (generally) don't understand anything other than price. Which means there's no way a builder can include an expensive "extra" such as this. At least not in a subdivision. Of course out in the boonies where there is one house in 160 acres, wells and cisterns are used.
In Australia are these water tanks required by building codes?