TheLittlestGuy

Did you know that the water that fills your toilet bowl after every flush is the same water that keeps your lawn green, cleans your dishes, becomes your ice cubes, and the same water that your family and pets drink from the tap?

If you didn’t, now you do. There’s one clean tap water line that comes to your house and one waste water line that leaves. Most water is taken from groundwater supplies, lakes, rivers, or reservoirs. The raw water that eventually becomes drinking water first undergoes screening to remove any sticks or large debris that may be in the water. Chemicals are added that cause contaminants to sink to the bottom of the water. The water is filtered through sand or some other small particle bed to remove the very small remaining particles. Now the water must be disinfected to make sure that any pathogens are destroyed. Some combination of chlorine, ozone, or ultraviolet light is used to kill living organisms left in the water.  Finally, the clean water is mixed with additives and minerals that help with taste, hardness, or tooth decay. This whole process is fairly expensive and energy intensive.

The average toilet uses about a gallon of water to flush - A gallon of clean drinking water right down the drain, literally. What a waste! In fact, every gallon of water that goes down your drains (from toilets, sinks, showers, washing machines and dishwashers) has to be treated too. The picture above shows sewage being dumped into a local stream. Here’s the gist of the process from Wikipedia:

Sewage is created by residences, institutions, hospitals and commercial and industrial establishments…First, the solids are separated from the wastewater stream. Then dissolved biological matter is progressively converted into a solid mass by using indigenous, water-borne microorganisms. Finally, the biological solids are neutralized then disposed of or re-used, and the treated water may be disinfected chemically or physically (for example by lagoons and micro-filtration). The final effluent can be discharged into a stream, river, bay, lagoon or wetland, or it can be used for the irrigation of a golf course, green way or park. If it is sufficiently clean, it can also be used for groundwater recharge.

So who peed in the water? You did! Just something to think about the next time you are wasting water. Conservation is something you can choose to do or not in every action that you take. Water has to be treated both before it comes to us and after we use it. Everything that you pour down your drain ends up either back in our drinking water or back in the environment.

Obviously water doesn’t get the attention that crude oil or coal get as a resource, but water and air are the most important resources we have. We can survive without petroleum. But we need water. Have you ever said that you would “die” without your iPhone or fancy car? Try living like 1.1 billion people do, with no access to any type of improved drinking source of water (according to the World Health Organization). That’s over 15% of the world’s total population.

I’m house sitting right now. It’s dark outside and about 40 degrees F. I’m currently using this computer and a halogen lamp with a 50 watt light in it. I’m completely alone in this house right now and there’s tons of stuff on besides this 50 watt lamp and computer. There are actually 19 other lights on – or there were until I walked through the house, counted, and turned off a few. A short list of the other things consuming power follows.

Active loads: this desktop computer (plus two routers and modem), all the lights, one of the house’s heaters and fan, several digital clocks, two water heaters (check out inline water heaters), two refrigerators, a large deep freezer, and a pool pump (which runs for about eight hours every day). But that’s not all. There are lots of things that are consuming power but appear to be off – Phantom loads.

Phantom loads are appliances that are “off” but still drawing power. I walked through the house again to make a list of phantom loads. Microwave, two coffee makers, a ton of power supplies with unused chargers attached, three televisions, two DVD players, cordless phone bases/chargers, dishwasher, sprinkler system, garage door openers, printer, shredder, alarm system and probably a few more things that I didn’t realize were drawing power.

Many appliances draw phantom loads to give them that “instant on” feature. Go unplug your television and then plug it in again and turn it on. It turns on much slower than if you have just shut it off and turned it back on. That’s instant on. It takes your television a few seconds longer to turn on if you unplug it because power converters and inverters inside of it require a moment to charge before they can produce the right power output. When televisions are off but still plugged in these power inverters are charged and ready to provide power to the television at any moment. Other times, phantom loads are small LED lights which tells us that an appliance is turned off but still plugged in. Kind of worthless, right?

What a shame! All this stuff is on for me, the littlest guy, and I’m only using one or two lights and this computer right now. Of course, I’d like the food to stay fresh and I’d like to stay warm too. But, with the exception of a few things, most of the stuff that is currently drawing power in this house could be turned off without any real inconvenience to me. I can safely say that I’m wasting more power than I’m using right now. This is a serious problem that our society – and the societies of many other developed countries aren’t addressing.