Water questions
I'm left with a couple of questions after reading " Area water authority urges meter change" in this morning's RGJ.
First, if Truckee Meadows Water Authority succeeds in getting water meters into the rest of the houses in the county, will local water authorities cancel assigned watering days? In other words, will they assume that paying for the amount of water they use will be enough of an incentive for people to conserve, and will they let wealthy/crazy/stubborn people use as much water as they want whenever they want as long as they pay for all of it?
Second, the sidebar lists the three top water wasters in 2005. It provides the number of gallons of water used by each and (at least for the first example) what that amount would have cost the customer "if metered." Maybe I'm missing something here, but if these customers aren't metered yet, how does TMWA know how much water they used?
First, if Truckee Meadows Water Authority succeeds in getting water meters into the rest of the houses in the county, will local water authorities cancel assigned watering days? In other words, will they assume that paying for the amount of water they use will be enough of an incentive for people to conserve, and will they let wealthy/crazy/stubborn people use as much water as they want whenever they want as long as they pay for all of it?
Second, the sidebar lists the three top water wasters in 2005. It provides the number of gallons of water used by each and (at least for the first example) what that amount would have cost the customer "if metered." Maybe I'm missing something here, but if these customers aren't metered yet, how does TMWA know how much water they used?
Believe it or not, your watering days have little to do with "wasting" water. What it has to do with is getting an even flow out of the water treatment so it can be predictable. that saves money, a LOT of money.
TMWA has been installing meters and many people get double bills. That means while they are still on a flat rate, we tell them what their metered rate would be. Because of this, many people switched. There are also many people who's rates will go down when they make the switch (and many will go up)
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Thank you for shedding light on the subject. The intent of my post was to point out what the reporter wasn't covering.
Now your comment raises new questions for me! How does getting an even flow out of water treatment save a lot of money? I believe you; I'm just curious as to why. Also, why don't the watering days public service announcements make the real reason clear?
I suspect that the phrase "if metered" in the article sidebar was a typo. The other two examples say, "at a metered rate."
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I’m just going to make up some numbers here to discuss the theory.
Let’s say that (because of meters) everyone could water whenever they wanted. Let’s also say that August 15th is the hottest day of the year and therefore that is the day everyone uses the most water, watering the lawn, letting the kids run through the sprinklers, etc. Historically, because of odd/even watering, the public has used 100 gallons of water on August 15th and 100 gallons on August 16th. But this year there are NO restrictions. A majority of people will water on the 15th AND the 16th. For argument’s sake we won’t say double just say 80% more, that’s 180 gallons.
No problem you would think, TMWA is still getting paid for all 180 gallons, what’s the big deal? Well, the Chalk Bluff Water Treatment Plan can only produce 120 gallons per day. So how do you fix that? Easy, expand the plant to accommodate 200 gallons per day. Sure, no problem, that’ll be $75,000,000 please. How will we pay for it? Again that’s easy – raise rates, OR, let’s stick to even/odd watering days, keep our plant at 120 gallons per day capacity and save $75 million. No one gets hurt, we save a bunch of money and we don’t have to raise rates.
That’s why it’s not about saving water, but saving you money.
Again, very generalized and my first try at putting it into writing, maybe not the best example.
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It makes perfect sense to me. Maybe the people writing the public service announcements are misguided? Or maybe I've been making assumptions when I've heard them because assigned watering days began when we were in a drought and supposedly were in danger of running out of water. It sounds as if the purpose has shifted since then, but it's certainly a worthy purpose. Thanks very much for writing again.
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