Thursday, January 10, 2008

Cool, Clear Water

Years ago it was the practice of our local City Council to send plumbers out free if anyone rang up to say their tap was leaking. Eventually some bean-counter decided this wasn’t profitable enough, even though it probably saved the Council hundreds of dollars in terms of water that wasn’t lost.
But in fact I’ve just been thinking today about an area in the water department, as it were, where water is wasted hugely, and not through anything dripping either.
Whenever we turn on a tap to get it to run hot, we waste several litres of water. I don’t know about other houses, but the water to our bathroom downstairs takes at last 30 seconds to come hot, and running the water upstairs takes even longer because it has to go a good deal farther. Of course some people have these instant heaters nowadays, but I would think plenty of other people don’t.
Wouldn’t it be good if somehow that water that we waste while we’re waiting for it to run hot could be set aside somehow? If we could somehow siphon it off and use it later to cool down the bath, or to brush our teeth in, or some other more environmentally profitable approach.
I’ll have to put my inventing cap on (such as it is) and see if I can come up with something.

Photo courtesy of Dan4th on Flickr.com

2 comments:

Dan4th said...

I think this is a great idea. I hope you come up with something awesome.

I was happy to see my photo used in a nice and thoughtful post. That was one of the last pictures I got of my cat (his name was Fish) before he passed away last year. It made me smile to look at it again. I haven't thought about that photo in months.

:) Thanks for using it.

Mike Crowl said...

Thanks for your comment. I was checking amongst the various photos on Flickr and while there were some very arty ones of taps dripping, the one with your cat had an appeal the others didn't have. Plus there was some idea in the back of my mind about a cat being used to lick up the excess water...but I couldn't quite develop it at the time! Have to think about it.