Is it more of a water bill thing, or do you actually effect the water supply? (Long showers, dishwashers, etc)
In: 2176
This depends where you live.
I live less than a mile from Lake Michigan. Our city’s water treatment facilities are at like 1% of capacity or something crazy like that. We get a credit on our water bill for using sprinklers in the summer. It’s like a rebate on the additional water usage in summer; they don’t actually care what you use it for but they assume you are watering your lawn and garden. I think this is some kind of “beautification” measure, but that’s just a guess.
Excess water down the drain affects waste water treatment. If there is a lot of rain, some of which gets into the sewage, untreated sewage can get dumped into the lake. So, a person might be contributing to they if they have a constantly leaking toilet or just leave their taps open because they are crazy or whatever. But right now, it’s been pretty dry and I doubt there has been any sewage dumping all summer.
In winter, if it is extremely cold, people will be encouraged to leave water running at a trickle to prevent freezing pipes. No one worries about the waste of water. The costs of water damage from burst pipes would be much higher than the (practically free) water. Our water bills come every two months and might be like, I don’t know, $30 or $40. It’s on auto-pay and hardly worth paying attention to.
On the other hand, most people don’t live near the largest bodies of fresh water on earth. Many people depend on groundwater or aqueducts. Southern and central California has lots of people and also grows a ton (well many, many tons) of our food. Wasting water is definitely a problem, particularly when there is drought. I’ll leave it to others to give an eli5 on why.
Dishwashers, by the way, generally use less water than hand washing. Dishwashers are a way to save water.
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