Instead of running water, you could say that ours is ‘rolling’ water. We’ve been doing this for about 10 years. The water is good, costs about a cent a gallon, and it’s cheap, if you don’t count the high gas and maintenance cost of driving that monstrous truck. And of course, there’s the occasional accident you might have with your tank falling out of the back of your truck in the middle of the road.
At first when we started doing this, we were worried that we would need to be real conservative with the water usage. But after a few years, we’ve realized that we don’t really use as much as we feared we would. Our family of 5 goes through about 80 gallons of water a day. That includes showers, toilets, washing machine, and dishwasher. The big draws are the washing machine and the bathtub. The toilets are a factor, but it isn’t worth the savings to not-flush. We used to have a saying, “If it’s yellow, that’s mellow. If it’s brown flush it down.” The problem with that is when you have young daughters who fill the bowl up with toilet paper. The if-it’s-brown rule didn’t work too well. So now it’s just “Flush.”
We’ve even managed to grow a large garden and plant a very pathetic lawn. The lawn has to survive without any water. I know that the pump cycles on for every 5 gallons of water, or so. When the sprinkler ran, the pump would come on about every two and a half minutes. That’s a lot of water to soak a small lawn. So our yard is beat and brown when the summer is hot and dry. But we have some super gardens. The water comes home after soccer games each evening. To water the garden when the weather is dry, our usage goes up about triple.
