(odd: i thought i had submitted this last night. i guess i just saved it in draft)
It’s been raining today which is good. The forecasters are predicting rain tomorrow and Friday which is even better. However, I’m still worried. It’s been over a month since the last real rain and close to six months since we’ve had normal rainfall. Raleigh i s down to about 3 months worth of water supply in the reservoirs – Atlanta’s not any better. What happens when cities actually run out of water? Do they evacuate?
In some sense’s, K and I are better and worse off. We’ve got a well, so unfortunately, we don’t have a clue as to how much water remains. For that matter, I don’t even know how deep the well is. The down side is that we could run out of water any day. The only positive is that we could always pay to have the well dug deeper. Talking to some neighbors, we’ve heard the rate is about $9/foot.
We’ve done a number of things over the past year or so (predating the drought) to reduce water usage. A year ago, our water softener recorded an average usage of ~150 gallons per day. We replaced our old toilets with newer low flow (current standard 1.6 gal) toilets and that got us down to around 100 gallons per day. We’ve started being more careful when washing dishes in the sink and I’ve started turning off the shower while soaping up or washing my hair. That gets us to a little over 80 gallons per day. I think my next trick might be to turn down the water pressure in our house – that would probably get us another 5-10 or so. After that, I start to think about low use appliances. I love this 2 drawer low water use dishwasher – each drawer takes ~2.4 gallons. Our washing machine is at least 14 years old, that could probably be replaced. I suppose we could also install a hot water recirculator to avoid wasting water letting faucets or showers heat up.
Hopefully, we’ll be okay. We sit near Jordan lake which is one of the collection points in the almost 10,000 sq mile Cape Fear River Basin. Hey, you may call it runoff, I call it ground water.
Y’all enjoy the rain.