water usage rates

I was born in L.A. in the 80s, during a bad drought. My parents drilled it into my brothers and me to conserve, conserve, conserve our water. I took baths with my brothers, my mom let her lawns go yellow and dry, and I got yelled at by my dad whenever I washed my hands for longer than a few seconds. And we never got to play in the water during hot summer months.

I also remember there was a public service announcement ad which ran on tv during my childhood that flabbergasted me. In it was a simple animation of a kid in a bathroom brushing his teeth and letting the sink faucet run water all the while. Right outside the bathroom was a small pond with a fish in it, and the running sink drained the pond nearly dry. Even now I don’t understand. What in the world do people need to run their sinks for when they’re standing around, brushing their teeth?

Currently L.A.’s water resources are running low, impacted both by low rainfall the past few years and an expanding population.

With all this history, I like to be aware of how much water I’m using.

So when one issue of National Geographic came, it didn’t have the usual Nat Geo map insert but an advertisement by Dow for something called Blue Planet Run 2007. Dow also included some numbers about water usage.

(2007? Wow, it took me a long time to get around to writing this entry!)

Some facts (or claims?) they list about water usage:

  • A shower can use 25 to 50 gallons of water.
  • Leaving the water running while brushing your teeth can waste up to 5 gallons. [GRRRR ARRRRGH]
  • The average full-tub bath takes 36 gallons.
  • One flush of toilet uses as much water as the average person in the developing world uses in a whole day.

That last factoid was something I already knew. It makes me feel guilty sometimes when I flush the toilet. With just one simple flick of the toilet handle, I essentially toss out clean water, about the same amount of water that some other people have to walk miles for, carrying buckets of water back home over a number of trips, in one day. And I flush multiple times a day! But then I remember back to when I was a kid and learned the rhyme, “if it’s yellow, let it mellow, if it’s brown, flush it down.” (Shudder.)

The other numbers made me curious, what were the flow rates of my family’s faucets? Over the years we’ve bought different faucets and installed water limiters on a couple of them. So exactly how much water came out of these fixtures?

My procedure was to turn on the faucet full blast and see how long it took to fill a four-pint container. (Equal to half a gallon.) This isn’t entirely scientific because I didn’t repeat my procedure enough times to get a good range of data. But I’m not doing this for science, it’s just out of curiosity. (I’d say my numbers are accurate within two more or less seconds.)

The results:

  • kitchen sink, which is the newest faucet in the house, 20 seconds
  • my bathroom sink, the oldest faucet, also has a water limiter, 23 seconds
  • my brother’s bathroom sink, the second-oldest faucet, had a water limiter but my brother switched it out, 20 seconds
  • my parents’ bathroom sink, newer than the previous two faucets, it’s upstairs so my mom thought the pressure difference would influence the time, 21 seconds.
  • the shower in my parents’ bathroom, 32 seconds
  • the bathtub in my parents’ bathroom, 4 seconds
  • the hose outside, 2 seconds

Basically, the faucets all run about the same rate except for my faucet being a tiny bit slower. (My mom was kind of upset with the new kitchen faucet, because the lower flow takes her more time to fill the sinks to wash dishes. I never timed the old faucets to compare.)

According to Dow, 5 gallons would be wasted from our faucets if we brushed our teeth for 3 minutes and 20 seconds. That’s a healthy duration; dentists recommend about 3 minutes. But that’s if the water is running full blast, both hot and cold. Nevermind why someone runs the water while brushing their teeth, why would someone run the water full blast?

Moving on, our shower runs a lot more slowly than anything else in the house. It’s a water-conserving shower head, most likely. But this just further proves my point about why I don’t use the shower: it takes forever to rinse the shampoo out of my full head of thick hair. Double that time now, too, since I started using conditioner.

(Ideally I would like a shower head with variable rates of water flow, from high enough to rinse out my hair within seconds, to turning off the water without having to touch the handles which I’ve adjusted to exactly the temperature I want. :P But my brother likes the shower head we have, and he uses it most often.)

The rate of water flow from the bathtub faucet by itself doesn’t mean much. Regardless of how high or low the water flow rate is, the tub is going to be filled to the bather’s liking. But what I did do with the information was time how long it took to fill my bath, then multiply by the rate of flow to find out how much water I use in my bath.

What I found out was that I obviously don’t turn on the water full blast when drawing my bath. It’s somewhere more like 50% to 75%, which takes 5.7 seconds and 4.6 seconds, respectively. Not too drastic a difference, but for the sake of simplification I’ll go with 5 seconds to fill half a gallon. At that rate, and about 3 minutes and 10 seconds to draw my bath, I use 20 or so gallons.

(Yes, I draw very shallow baths. I don’t like showers and love baths, but not at the expense of “36 gallons,” according to Dow’s average. Don’t worry, I’m an environmentalist. I suffer for Mother Earth.)

A 20-gallon bath would be less than Dow’s numbers for a shower, but my shower head is water conserving. A 15-minute shower in my house would use up only 15 gallons. We could take a luxurious 20-minute shower and still only use about 20 gallons!

Of course, if I have to spend those 5 extra minutes rinsing out my hair, and cursing the shower head all the while, I don’t see the point. (Yes, I suppose I did go through all this data gathering to justify why, in L.A., I choose water-hogging baths over water-saving showers. *grin*)

I gathered the last datum just on a whim. I’d measured every other water fixture in our house, why not the one outside, located at the very source? (That being the water main.) I expected it to be about the same as the bathtub, I mean the hose isn’t all that big. But surprisingly, the tub faucet’s flow rate is twice as long for the same amount of water!

What could I extrapolate from this information that would have some significance? We don’t use the hose to water the gardens, but we do use it to wash our cars. Aha! So at 2 seconds to fill half a gallon, or 4 seconds for one gallon, letting the hose run while washing the car for say 10 minutes would use up 150 gallons. 150 gallons! That would provide enough water for 100 people in third-world countries!

Don’t you appreciate having running water in your home so much more now? Doesn’t it make you want to use it wisely, so we don’t run out of clean water in the future? I sure hope it does.

yucky ocha

I am still surprised, after almost a year, how gross ocha can be if made with tap water here.

I’ve probably been spoiled, living in L.A. where water comes from high up in Colorado. Here, it comes from groundwater, where there’s lots of minerals.

Although I can tell when I’ve been served tap water in restaurants in L.A., it just doesn’t compare to the tap water here. In L.A. it’s fine using tap water for instant ramen; I don’t drink the broth, and the taste of the water isn’t intrusive enough to ruin the noodles. Here, tap water makes the already salty noodles noticeably more salty. Which, yes, tastes just as bad as it sounds.

But honestly, I probably would not have noticed the difference in the ramen if it hadn’t been for my beloved ocha. I can use the tap water fine to make rice, tortellini, wonton soup. It’s the ocha where I really, really noticed a not-so-subtle disgusting taste that ruined the green tea.

Now I buy distilled water, specifically, at the market to get nice ocha. I use it only for ocha and ramen. I also buy water with “minerals added for taste” just for drinking. (That’s the one at the market I go to. I have to go to another market entirely for distilled water. And non-molassassed bread.) I can taste when C has used the water kettle for instant ramen, it makes my ocha bad. boo. But I can’t tell him, Use the expensive, nice-tasting water! If he doesn’t notice a difference in the ramen, there’s no reason I should waste more money keeping my ocha nice. I just have to remember to empty the kettle of water before I add my own.

Just two more weeks, and I get to go home to nice water.

posting…New Year’s weekend

I’ve been a lazy blogger. Bad me. Umm, lessee…

December 27th, Wednesday, took my car in for 30,000 mile maintenance. The service area’s computers were out, and we (Daddy and I) waited an hour then found out the computers were back on but they didn’t tell us. -.-

My car didn’t get worked on until 2 in the afternoon, and so my car wasn’t ready until the next day. Argh. I woke up at nine to see if the car was ready but they didn’t call so I called them, then got put on hold for about 5 minutes before I was disconnected. (It’s a very busy place with not so good channels of communication open with the customers.) So then Daddy Hidek and I went in the van to pick up Noelle Tadash and SM00 for the weekend.

Friday we (everyone, Mum Daddy Hidek Noelle Tadash SM00 me) went to Mitsuwa in Torrance. Mmm, good udon. *grin* Everyone else (except Daddy, he didn’t get anything) had ramen.

Went to the bookstore. I bought the Paradise Kiss manga series in some special large(r) format. I don’t know what it is, I can’t read the Japanese on it, but I do know it’s an inch or so larger on the sides. Then we went to Fry’s, but Mum Daddy and I stayed in the car. They had the Wii but you had to buy 5 games with it. o.O Odd.

Oh yeah, it turns out my car was ready at 10 on Thursday. They must have called right after we stepped out the door. ;.; We went to pick it up at 3 but their computers were down again so we couldn’t pay with credit card. ARGH. So we left then came back at 5 to pick up my car.

Hidek rented Talladega Nights from Blockbuster, we watched that Thursday/Friday night, I don’t remember. We thought it was really funny. ^_^;; Daddy and I (and Mickey, some) watched practically all the extras. I really liked it. But this movie had less, er, guest roles? (drivers from NASCAR) than Cars did. :/ I thought that was kinda boring. But I guess they didn’t really fit into the story.

Erm, I don’t remember, one day we watched Shimotsuma Monogatari (English title: Kamikaze Girls) and Dark Water. Was it Saturday? And we watched Talladega Nights on Friday? It was weird, ’cause after watching Dark Water, that night SM00 went into the hallway and she came out saying water was dripping from the smoke alarm. O.o! The girl was coming to haunt us! But it turned out that the toilet upstairs flooded, and leaked downstairs. ehehe That night the boys and I played Texas Hold’em. Then SM00 joined us to play the boardgame Payday. (1994 edition. Apparently, the old version didn’t have the lottery. o.o But that part is so fun! XD)

Sunday we went to their house to make mochi. (Gee, I can’t say “pound mochi” can I?)

Monday, New Year’s, that was fun. I actually got to see the whole Rose Parade for once. o.o I think last year I was too nervous about school to sit down and watch television. And all the years before, we always went to a relative’s house to celebrate and not much tv watching got done. I guess I missed out on the Stephanie Edwards and Bob Eubanks era. :( I remember her, but I never really watched so I don’t know how she did the parade.

Tuesday Daddy, Hidek and I went to Borders. I returned the Nana manga that had the security device with the dried up glue that was pulling out the paper and got a $20 journal for only $1.73 with the return and my holiday savings. woohoo! Then I went with Daddy to Barnes and Noble. Why? I dunno. Just felt like going out, maybe I felt like looking at their journals and date books.

Wednesday Mum and I went out shopping.

Thursday I watched a lot of Monk season 3.

Friday, I don’t remember. o.O Saturday all the relatives got together at Noelle’s house for New Year’s. We left our house at 9 like we planned (shocking; maybe everyone was hungry, haha) and got to Noelle’s house around 10. Had good ozoni. XD Hidek bought Wario Ware, so we played that. I made wonton with Daddy helping. Then the boys played NASCAR I don’t remember which one, for the Gamecube. Then we had dinner. Yummm. I’ve got some leftovers sitting in the fridge for dinner sometime this week. XD

Sunday packed up my stuff. Pretty much all I did was watch tv. Drove up to school. Unpacked stuff.

playing catch-up (not catsup)

Quick post, since I haven’t updated in a while and I don’t want to be overwhelmed with whatall I haven’t talked about whenever I do get the time to actually write out a post nicely.

Saturday went with Mum, Hidek, and Noelle and her family to Japan Expo. X) It was fun. This year we watched a bit of dancing (last year we watched a bit of kendo [?] and the year before that we watched nothing). Mum thinks it was from the north. Interesting. I have no concept of north and south in Japan. Well maybe extreme south, like the islands or something. I just know Tokyo vs the country.

I bought lots of stuff. :o I brought my $90 of allowance that I hadn’t collected during the school quarter, and I think I left with about $20. *shifty eyed* (I’d planned a MasterCard-type post, nevermind how overplayed that is, but since I’m so brilliant [I’d planned another post with the title “how brilliant am I?” *snicker*), I brought my camera and laptop home over the weekend but forgot the cable, then brought my camera back to school and left my laptop home [I was only going to be there for two days], then I brought my camera home but I forgot the cable! So the list of all the stuff I bought will have to wait until next week.)

Afterwards we went to J-town and went to the Curry House. *drooool* I had a seafood curry. Shrimp, scallop, and squid. :o I had squid! I dunno which white lump it was, but it was all good. XD Went to the Kinokuniya there. First time there. It’s big. o_o It had Kera and most of the Gothic & Lolita Bibles (just didn’t have the first issue). I would have bought one, but I wanted to buy something at a store later (it ended up not having anything good though, boo).

Even when we were there, I was glad I didn’t live in L.A. hahaha! Yes, it’s bad enough on the Westside, traffic-wise, but it’s home. I couldn’t live in SLO. There’s nothing there. SLO and Downtown L.A.: nice places to visit, wouldn’t want to live there. (Oh wait, I technically do live in SLO.)

Um, Friday night when I drove home with Hidek, we left at 2:50 and hit traffic in Santa Barbara, then got through Ventura and hit traffic going up to Calabasas. We got home about 7:30. *was dead* I wanted to stop at the outlet mall at around 6 so I could buy dinner (I was hungry ;.;) but Hidek didn’t want me to. grrr. So to prove to him why I didn’t want to drive, and to prove to myself I could do it, I drove. I know I don’t make sense. :) When I’m angry, I’m contradictory. (And Hidek thought we were near the Getty when we were near Lost Hills. HAHAHA not on your life bub.)

I got off the 101 at Ventura Blvd. Was gonna drive down Beverly Glen (wheee!) but Hidek saw Sepulveda and asked to go there. From there I got on the 405 since it looked good and got off at Santa Monica, to Westwood, then home. My odometer read only 196.6 miles. Weird.

But Tuesday night it was really nice (except for the thick fog in Santa Maria o_o), we left at 8:15 and got home around 11ish. I was a lot less tired after that drive. XD Noooo traffic. Well except around the 101/405 interchange. But it wasn’t bad at all.

Hm. Monday went to class and lab and in lab we worked on HTML. I just halfheartedly worked at the exercise then I started reading web standards stuff. XD Which reminds me, I have to make a webpage before Monday. meep.

Tuesday, lecture lab lecture. First lecture had a quiz. Hope I did all right. *furtive glance* Lab, turned in project (for future reference, I can’t stand white matting). Uh, after that … I tried catching up on the notes I haven’t rewritten, but then I read my friends list on Livejournal and I got sidetracked ’cause someone posted a link on the Something Positive feed to funny cat pictures, which I spent about maybe 2 hours looking at and saving pictures. XD;;;

Yesterday … I didn’t really do anything. And that’s it.

LA, LA

I hope this entry won’t seem like I’m belittling these incidents (because God knows they’re creeping the heck out of me).

“Racially Charged Incidents Rattle L.A.” ← headline on Yahoo.

“…the inland suburbs of Los Angeles…”   “…Riverside and San Bernardino counties…” ← in that article.

Yeah, ’cause Riverside and San Bernadino counties are included in the city boundaries of Los Angeles … I mean, I understand, who outside of Southern California has heard of Riverside or San Bernadino? They have to make it so other people understand where the general area is … but it still annoys me.

This one guy said online, I forget where I read it, all cities in California are L.A. :b I wish! (Well not really…) You should know that I really like L.A. Not all of it, but I like the convenience of everything, I like how it doesn’t have that really big city feeling unless you go downtown or something, I like the diversity, I like the weather (of course) … other things I can’t think of. I plan to never ever ever leave SoCal. And, I guess considering how not like L.A. other places in SoCal are … I’m never going to leave L.A.?

Not that I’m generalizing other places … I hope not … I know there are good areas and bad areas to every place. But this is what makes me feel like L.A. is a veritable little island paradise: hearing about white supremacist groups in Riverside and San Bernadino counties; knowing Simi Valley is (or was, I guess?) a white flight area, meaning whites who wanted to get away from minorities moved there; hearing about this one mosque that almost wasn’t in Orange County because churches were protesting its existence, saying that a mosque would create even more traffic and take away more parking spaces on Sundays (or in other words … “They’re taking my flock away from me!”). I dunno.

I’ve been … sort of living in Ventura County for the past three years … well, during the week, when I attend classes, and only fall/winter/spring. The one thing I’ve noticed about myself … last semester I was amazed at every single Asian face I saw … and this semester it’s not only Asian faces but every single non-white face. o_o WTF?! Every time I see a minority I just go “Wao! MINORITY! *gawk*” >_<

So … if anyone knows of a big city with absolutely no night life and has a lot of commercialization and diversity and nice weather and everything, tell me. I want to know my options when the Big One (earthquake) comes.

Oh yes, someone, anyone, try commenting on my tagboard?