I erred in the amount of water I use at home, I gave the figure for one
month average, the annual volume of water was 132 kL in 2007 and 75 kL in
2008. These figures are more in line with what Jim and Pat have given. They
vary considerable because of a dry year in 2007 and more watering of the
lawn.
Mike Payne
----- Original Message -----
From: "James R. Frysinger" <[email protected]>
To: "Pat Naughtin" <[email protected]>
Cc: "Michael Payne" <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, 26 June 2009 03:17
Subject: Re: Fwd: [USMA:45270] Re: Precipitation and water needs
Whew! I was beginning to wonder if you folks had fewer days in a year than
we do up here! Grin.
Jim
Pat Naughtin wrote:
Dear Jim a Michael,
The figure for water use in Melbourne is 155 litres per day.
Michael is called Michael – and not Martin!
Cheers,
Pat Naughtin
Author of the forthcoming book, /Metrication Leaders Guide/. PO Box 305
Belmont 3216,
Geelong, Australia
Phone: 61 3 5241 2008
Metric system consultant, writer, and speaker, Pat Naughtin, has helped
thousands of people and hundreds of companies upgrade to the modern
metric system smoothly, quickly, and so economically that they now save
thousands each year when buying, processing, or selling for their
businesses. Pat provides services and resources for many different
trades, crafts, and professions for commercial, industrial and government
metrication leaders in Asia, Europe, and in the USA. Pat's clients
include the Australian Government, Google, NASA, NIST, and the metric
associations of Canada, the UK, and the USA. See
http://www.metricationmatters.com
<http://www.metricationmatters.com/>for more metrication information,
contact Pat at [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]> or to get the free
'/Metrication matters/' newsletter go to:
http://www.metricationmatters.com/newsletter to subscribe.
Begin forwarded message:
*From: *Pat Naughtin <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>
*Date: *26 June 2009 10:57:19 AM
*To: *"U.S. Metric Association" <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>
*Cc: *USMA Metric Association <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>
*Subject: **[USMA:45270] Re: Precipitation and water needs*
*Reply-To: *[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>
Dear Jim and Martin,
Jim's figure of 70 cubic metres per person per year looks a lot higher
than Martin's 6.3 and 11 cubic metres per year!
Currently, with level 3A water restrictions in Melbourne – 70 kilometres
from Geelong – the people there are restricted to 1255 litres per person
per day. This amounts to about 57 cubic metres per person per year. By
the way they're called kilolitres here when used for measuring water.
In Geelong our local water authority, Barwon Water, says:
Did you know?...
* On average, a person uses about 200 litres of water per day, of
which 5-10 litres is for basic survival, ie drinking and food
preparation.
* The other 190 litres is discretionary and is used for washing
(showers, dishes, clothes, toilets) and the garden.
* Some communities have been successful in reducing average
personal tap water usage to as low as 130 litres per day.
* Approximately half the water supplied to urban areas in
Australia ends up as waste water, according to a report by the
Institute for Sustainable Futures prepared for the Water
Services Association in 1998.
200 litres per day is about 73 000 litres per year (73 kL) , and
130 litres per day is about 47 000 litres (47 kL) per year.
Cheers,
Pat Naughtin
Geelong, Australia
On 2009/06/16, at 4:19 AM, James R. Frysinger wrote:
The old Navy rule of thumb was to ensure that shipboard desalination
plants could provide 50 gal of water per day per man in addition to
what was needed for propulsion plant needs. That 50 gal figure works
out to just about 192 L daily for each man or about 70 m3 per man per
year. Those human needs include drinking water (the rule was prevalent
in days of non-air-conditioned ships!), showers, laundry, and cooking.
Once we get our new house built (soon, I hope!) we will look at the
expense of installing tanks and gutters to capture the rainfall from
its roof and that of our tractor shed. Recently we had a moderately
heavy rainfall of nearly 50 mm. That house runoff would have amounted
to about 6 m3 and the tractor shed's runoff would have amounted to
about 4 m3. I won't say that such runoff is wasted, since we are
sitting on a 100 ha farm and that water supplies some of the needs of
the pasture land and forest around us. But it might be nice to redirect
the runoff to the gardens and livestock.
Jim
Michael Payne wrote:
Interesting that most of this water requirement is for agriculture. I
looked at my water usage at home and it varies each year depending on
how much I water my lawn in summer. Last year we used about 6,3 cubic
meters for two, the previous year we used 11 cubic meters. This is
showers, laundry and watering the garden when required, normally July
August. Bear in mind I'm gone a lot and use hotel water. Still it does
not seem like a lot of water when I compare it to the 1000 cubic
meters needed per person in the article below.
On another note, I read recently that it's illegal in a couple of
western states to collect rainwater off your roof. In Colorado they
are trying to change the law.
Mike Payne
----- Original Message ----- From: "James R. Frysinger"
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>
Cc: <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
Sent: Saturday, 13 June 2009 13:36
Subject: [USMA:45230] Precipitation and water needs
I participate in CoCoRaHS (http://www.cocorahs.org/), an organization
that collects daily precipitation observations from a rapidly growing
network of nearly 10 000 volunteers in the U.S. (Please consider
joining!) After the daily report has been submitted the
acknowledgment page appears and it contains some sort of anecdote,
which changes periodically. Below my signature is the one that
appeared today.
It's nice to see that this anecdote is entirely metric (with but one
exception), as is our National Weather Service. Ironically, CoCoRaHS
requires non-metric values from its volunteers; everything is
measured in inches on their reports.
I have my Davis Vantage PRO 2 weather station set up to read out in
metric units and must then do a conversion to submit my precipitation
reports. Since NWS keeps its records in metric units, it would be
nice if CoCoRaHS migrated in that direction. They could start by
allowing metric data submission as a option and then migrating their
volunteers toward using metric rain gauges, etc.
The anecdote reproduced here then would be immediately relevant to
the volunteers, since one liter is the same as a millimeter of rain
falling on one square meter of surface. And of course one cubic meter
is the same as 1000 liters.
My records show that my 100 hectare farm received 1208.3 mm of rain
last year, a droughty year since the normal for this area is closer
to 1500 mm. Still, that means that 1.2 million cubic meters of rain
fell on my farm in 2008, enough to "support" 1200 people. That's the
beauty of the metric system -- ease of calculation. So one can
calculate the area of some location in square kilometers and then
look at the annual rainfall there. Every millimeter of rain that
fells on each square kilometer of that location is the amount needed
by one person -- one to one!
My mode of getting that water to them was provision of timber, eggs,
and cattle as well as potable runoff (downstream and via aquifers).
Jim
Water Footprint
The minimum water that each person requires, on average, for
drinking, hygiene and growing food is about 1,000 cubic meters per
year. That's about 2/5 of an olympic size swimming pool. Because the
distribution of global water resources varies widely, some people get
much more than this and some people get less.
Researchers have recently developed the concept of a "water
footprint". As indicated on the water footprint web page
(http://www.waterfootprint.org), “The water footprint of an
individual, business or nation is defined as the total volume of
freshwater that is used to produce the goods and services consumed by
the individual, business or nation.”
You can figure out your own water footprint using the calculator
(quick and more extensive versions) on this site as well learn the
total water required to produce various products. Some interesting
facts about our water use from the water footprint web site:
* *The production of one kilogram of beef requires 16 thousand
litres of water.
* *To produce one cup of coffee we need 140 litres of water.
* *The water footprint of China is about 700 cubic meter per year
per capita. Only about 7% of the Chinese water footprint falls
outside China.
* *Japan with a footprint of 1150 cubic meter per year per capita,
has about 65% of its total water footprint outside the borders of the
country.
* *The USA water footprint is 2500 cubic meter per year per
capita.
In addition to the water footprint web site, check out the
August 2008 issue of Scientific American to learn more about the
global variability of fresh water.
--
James R. Frysinger
632 Stony Point Mountain Road
Doyle, TN 38559-3030
(C) 931.212.0267
(H) 931.657.3107
(F) 931.657.3108
--
James R. Frysinger
632 Stony Point Mountain Road
Doyle, TN 38559-3030
(C) 931.212.0267
(H) 931.657.3107
(F) 931.657.3108
Cheers,
Pat Naughtin
Author of the forthcoming book, /Metrication Leaders Guide/. PO Box 305
Belmont 3216,
Geelong, Australia
Phone: 61 3 5241 2008
Metric system consultant, writer, and speaker, Pat Naughtin, has helped
thousands of people and hundreds of companies upgrade to the modern
metric system smoothly, quickly, and so economically that they now save
thousands each year when buying, processing, or selling for their
businesses. Pat provides services and resources for many different
trades, crafts, and professions for commercial, industrial and
government metrication leaders in Asia, Europe, and in the USA. Pat's
clients include the Australian Government, Google, NASA, NIST, and the
metric associations of Canada, the UK, and the USA. See
http://www.metricationmatters.com
<http://www.metricationmatters.com/>for more metrication information,
contact Pat at [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]> or to get the free
'/Metrication matters/' newsletter go to:
http://www.metricationmatters.com/newsletter to subscribe.
--
James R. Frysinger
632 Stony Point Mountain Road
Doyle, TN 38559-3030
(C) 931.212.0267
(H) 931.657.3107
(F) 931.657.3108
