to not understand how you waste water

[moogster1a]

if you leave a tap on all day / flush the loo loads/ wash every item of clothing you own, the waste water goes down the pipes and basically to waste water treatment plants, cleaned up, and put back in the clean water system.
I see how this can be expensive, but the water isn't actually wasted, so why are we encouraged to use the same amount as if we were living on the skeleton coast of Namibia?

swanker solar winds destroyed mars atmosphere and water after it's magnetic field stopped. Prof Brian Cox explained it all much better than I every could.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QrYp8xGLhE

Do you leave your lights on all day? Leave the car idling all day etc. etc?
Because in treating water, and pumping it to your home, the water companies use a lot of energy. They use the most energy in water for homes, because it has to be so clean.

So if you waste water you are wasting energy.

wasting energy, not water.

Oh- thank you mindy! Will watch that later. People on MN really do know everything

Now how on earth does a planet's magnetic field stop?

'Tis all connected though because we will very shortly run out of non-renewable fuels which provide us with the energy to treat the water in the first place. That's why renewables are so important. Wasting water wastes energy that is then needed to treat the water.
Coal will run out in about 200 years and oil in about 50 - we are very profligate with our energy supplies and when they run out we have no energy to treat the water.

And I always knew there must be a good side to our wet Scottish weather - we don't have the same drought problems although even up here our reservoirs have had very reduced volumes sometimes.

I have worked a LOT in the past on water projects.
Most of the domestic & agricultural water in southern Britain (where most of the people live) comes from aquifers (groundwater). This is very slow to recharge; the levels (how far down you have to go to get water) have been falling steadily for the last 60-70 years. The actual data are frightening; we are very much mining groundwater resources. So wasting water makes it more & more expensive (& energy intensive) to procure fresh water. I personally think the long term solution will be to pump a lot of it down from Scotland, but that will have deleterious impacts, too.

Would it not also be scarily expensive to pump it down from here to the south ragged? Then of course the energy implications of pumping it down and the environmental impact of huge pipe systems...................
As far as I'm concerned everyone is welcome to it where it's needed but I bet it will cost a fortune. Mind you, maybe that will just have to be shouldered, but why who?

but by who for crying out loud!!

Yes - the snow just melts, but it results in the "wrong type" of water, like we often get the "wrong type" of rain after a hot spell.

Snow melt tends to result in a large volume of water appearing quickly - very akin to a torrential summer storm. There's lots of water there, but the state of the ground (either frozen or baked solid) means the water runs off the surface rather than soaking in, so it is unable to re-enter the ground water system which is the source for much of our fresh water, especially in the South.

To recharge the reservoirs once they're low we need prolonged periods of steady rain, falling onto soft soil, so that a significant percentage of that rainfall has time to soak in and percolate down into the aquifers.

swanker it's something to do with the flows "inside the planet", if our stops we're buggered!

As far I'm concerned, the key point is why be wasteful just for the sake of being wasteful. Everything costs something, be it energy, time or money, surely it's just a case of seeing the bigger picture.

However OP this has resulted in a very interesting thread!

I know that if our magnetic field is reversed we simply tunnel to the centre of the earth and release a nuclear bomb. According to the science documentary "the core" .

moogster1a - sorry to potentially be daft, but is that a tongue-in-cheek comment? Please?

Would it not also be scarily expensive to pump it down from here to the south ragged? Then of course the energy implications of pumping it down and the environmental impact of huge pipe systems

California does it, somehow, and they have fewer people spread further out and in much (MUCH) drier conditions. . Conservation is preferable, but long distance pumping is hardly unusual or infeasible.

glad my explanation helped. i am quite surprised that everybody doesn't know this stuff but more than happy to talk about it.

somebody mentioned snow.. the interesting thing about snow is that in countries with high mountain ranges it is very important for regulating water supply.

snow falls on the alps or himalayas all winter and sits there until very late in the spring.. can be june even.. and it melts slowly (usually), letting water fill the streams and rivers and slowly irrigate the lower lying land in spring when crops need the water.

if the temerature rises (like this year in the alps) the precipitation falls as rain and straight away runs away down the valleys through winter and into the sea. when spring comes and the crops need water, it's all gone.

so in big mountain ranges, snow acts like a reservoir and without snow in winter, they will have big droughts in summer and crop failure.

California Aqueduct is 701.5 miles; that was built in the 1960s, I think, so technology is better now, right? It's 1075 miles from the Cairngorns to London (says Google maps, down the M1).
I prefer conservation, but to say a long distance aqueduct is impossible is untrue.

I've often wondered the same thing about stuff going into landfill sites. They can only fill up with things that have come from the earth, or made from stuff that has come from the earth. Surely it's all just the same stuff going round and round in slightly different guises?

Mine's a chocolate digestive by the way.

I've often wondered the same thing about stuff going into landfill sites. They can only fill up with things that have come from the earth, or made from stuff that has come from the earth. Surely it's all just the same stuff going round and round in slightly different guises?

Yes - but it all comes down to timescales. On a geological time scale then either that landfill site will be eroded and washed into an ocean, or it will be preserved as a sedimentary feature - which will then be buried and (possibly) subjected to extreme heat and/or pressure. On a geological time scale, the materials in the landfill will probably be broken down and redistributed.

On a human time scale its a mass of precious materials that have been harvested or mined in some way shape or form, and have then been concentrated or processed in some way - using a fair amount of energy in the process. Think of all the metal, all the plastics that are thrown away - many of which won't break down for 10s or 100s of years, if not longer. Most of the plastics will originally have been generated from hydrocarbons - we could recycle them (which might be quite a good idea) but many people can't be bothered and throw them in landfill instead. Or they live in a county with ridiculous regulations on what can be recycled (ours will take any plastic, as long as its bottle shaped and only if its bottle shaped - drives me up the wall how much recyclable plastic we bin as there's no where else I can take it ).

So yes, if you want to wait a few 100,000 years then what we chuck in landfill today will have become a geological resource again...

Long distance aqueducts are a solution to the water shortage problem in the SE. But I think we need a number of mind-set changes before there's a hope of it coming to pass. The biggest issues I can see include the Scots resenting the grasping English stealing yet another of their natural resources and those who will be inconvenienced by the construction and presence of the massive aqueduct but perceive they will get no benefit from it. The latter might be more soluble if they can turn the aqueduct into a leisure resource and power generation system rather than purely a means of transporting water from A to B, but I'm not sure how you'd go about persuading Scotland that shifting a large volume of water into England was a good idea!

YABU. Fresh water is not constantly available everywhere. Not even in the UK. It turns up at the wet times of year, we keep as much of it in reservoirs as we can and we spin it out during the dry times of the year. Like my water barrel in the garden. When it rains, it fills up... but if I leave the tap on and accidentally empty the thing, that's it until it rains again.

Were you alive in the summer of 1976?.... very memorable images around at the time of almost empty reservoirs with cracked bases, people filling canisters from stand-pipes in the streets and so on. Yes, the rains came eventually and the reservoirs refilled but, for many months, conserving what was left was very important.