I finally settled on a water meter to install after the main PWSA meter here in the house. Why, you ask? First off, the PWSA meter doesn’t have a physical readout, unlike the gas and electric meters. Second, the smallest increment that PWSA will bill for is 1000 gallons, and thus the bill shows up with either 0, 1, 2, or 3 thousands of gallons. Yes, I have actually gotten bills for zero thousands of gallons. We all know that’s not true, but due to the rounding to the nearest thousand gallons, I had a couple months where the difference from the previous cycle must have been less than 500 gallons. The meter I just purchased from jerman.com has an increment of 1/10 of a gallon, which is a little less than two cups. It also has what claims to be a trickle detector to alert me of very slow drips. We’ll see how that functionality works out.
That said, I look forward to the opportunity to more closely track the water consumption of specific uses and activities. For example, I certainly don’t know the volume of water used in Low, Medium and High settings on the washing machine, and how efficient (or inefficient) it actually is.
Janeen and I are already serious water savers, the details of which I won’t get into here (feel free to email me if you’d really like to know more). But, hey, let’s at least see how good we are at it, as the PWSA bill doesn’t really help with that. After all, Information is power.
Look for an upcoming post specifically about washing dishes by hand versus the dishwasher. The conventional stance is that dishwashers are more water-efficient, but that is generally compared to people who run the water the entire time they are washing dishes. Stay tuned…
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