I don’t understand how you can just leave the tap on–where does that water come from?
Is the water from your kitchen sink and your toilet the same water?
Is water really being “wasted”?
In: Engineering
If you are on a well system it comes from a well somewhere close by. If you are on the municipal water system your municipal has water storage. This could be reservoirs or water towers or a mix. Those storages are at a higher altitude to allow gravity to pressurize the water system using just its weight. Those storages are fed by aquifers, rivers, and lakes. In rare cases the fresh water can come from desalination.
When you leave a tap running you aren’t removing water from Earth. However you are removing water from storage and there might not be enough water coming into replace that “wasted” water. Droughts reduce rainfall so the initial source of water can start to dry up. Snow fall the previous winter melts during the spring to also feed lakes and such. If there wasn’t much snow there won’t be as much to melt so you can also run into shortages that way.
Your house has a single pipe coming into it. It will have a pressure control valve that steps down the pressure from the municipal supply to a more reasonable pressure for your home. The water in the tap is the same as the water in the toilet tank.
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There are two possible choices. If you have a well, then it comes from the aquifer under your house, and you live out in the country in an non-desert place. If you are like 90+% of people it comes from a water treatment plant.
The water plant takes water from a river, or underground, and purifies it so that it’s safe to drink.
Yes, there is only one water supply pipe to most homes, though some communities have special “outdoor water” that’s not clean enough to drink that’s used outside to water the plants. The water you flush the toilet with is drinkable water.
All the water that goes into drains goes to a wastewater treatment plant where it’s cleaned up and usually put into a river (unless you’re in that community with “outside water”).
Water is wasted all the time. Because the price of drinking water is so small, between 0.4 and 0.8 cents per gallon, there is little financial incentive to conserve it. That’s also why “solutions” like desalination aren’t really feasible, water has to be almost free for people to be happy.
In my area the water goes to a treatment plant upon entering the drain and then into the sewer pipe, where the waste is separated from the water and “cleaned” enough to get put back into a river that heads to the ocean. When we get too much rain sometimes they have to dump the raw sewage and pay a fine and issue an advisory to avoid the river for a few days.
Most water comes from either surface bodies of water (lakes, rivers) or from wells. Washington DC’s water comes from the [Potomac River](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Aqueduct). New York City’s water comes from [large lakes in upstate New York](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_water_supply_system) and transported over miles of pipes down to the city. Other locations pump water from underground aquifers — places where water gets kind of ‘stuck’ underground in the soil due to the different layers of soil.
In municipal systems the water will be cleaned and filtered via various means, including chlorination and fluoridation. Failure to properly filter and clean the water can results in [people getting sick.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Milwaukee_cryptosporidiosis_outbreak)
It will then be pumped into a network of water mains to pressurize the system. Various intermediate pumps may exist to keep the system pressurized with sufficient water to meet household demand.
Yes, the same water coming from your sink tap is also the water that goes into your toilet. Its also the same water that comes out of your shower head and garden hose.
The water once it goes down the drain will go to a sewage treatment plant. It will be treated to remove the worst-of-the-worst and allowed to return to the Earth.
Some places will discharge it to recharge basins where it can percolate down back to the aquifer, others will pump it several miles out in to the ocean or some other body of water.
If you’re not on a municipal sewer system, it will go to a septic system which allows water to percolate back into the Earth while separating out “sludge” and letting various bacteria eat and decompose the biological material.
The water down the drain is wasted in some sense, but not others.
The water eventually returns to the Earth.
However, our supplies of clean accessible water are dwindling. It also takes a lot of effort/energy to convert water from “raw” to safe and ready to drink.
Locations like the Colorado River, which is used to supply water to 5+ states, are at historic lows.
where does it come from? where does it go?
lemme check in with Cotton Eye Joe
It comes from the local water tower which tries to keep the water level within the tower at a fixed height. This results in fixed water pressure for users since pressure is only dependent on height. They have a big pump that they use to pump water up to do this.
That water comes from the local water treatment plant, which treats either surface water (rivers/lakes/etc) or groundwater (aquifers) or in rare cases salt water (salty aquifers/oceans) to remove contaminants and microbes (using filters, UV light, etc), and add stuff like fluoride (to protect teeth) and chlorine (to continue killing microbes).
After you use water, it goes to a wastewater treatment plant which uses filters and bacterial digestion to remove organic and inorganic solids from the water, before killing the bacteria with chlorine, and then waiting for the chlorine levels to fall back within acceptable ranges before releasing the wastewater back into the ocean/river/lake/aquifer.
There’s a few answers, but I think I can simplify it:
Your town fills up a really big bucket from a local river or lake and puts the bucket up high.
The water pours downhill from the bucket and all the way to your house.
You use the water and When it goes into your drain it falls down another hill and goes into a big water filter.
When all the water is filtered, they either pump it back into the bucket, or back into the river.
-edit –
Generally yes the kitchen water and toilet water is the same water. You’re good to drink from whichever you prefer.
And no you’re not “wasting” water. But you may be wasting the fuel and effort it took to clean and deliver it to you
Water is not “wasted” in the sense that it ceases to be. However, the water that comes from your supply lines is clean water that is safe to drink, bathe in, etc. (even if you use it to fill the toilet or water the lawn.)
For a major city utility, the water usually comes from large surface bodies of water such as lakes or rivers. This water (usually basically clean, if not literally safe to drink) is pumped to a treatment station, and goes through the appropriate processes to meet the stringent standards to be considered “potable”. It is then pumped, at pressure, to consumers of the water. (It is important the pressure remain at a certain level, or mud surrounding the pipes can infiltrate the water supply.)
Once it comes out of your faucet, it cannot be re-used until it has been treated to remove whatever contaminants might have been introduced. If you are on a city utility, this will generally be via a “sanitary sewer” system, where the waste will work its way to a treatment plant, where the miracle of modern sanitation engineering will at least render it safe enough to introduce back into surface or ground waters without harming the ecosystem. The eventual output of the treatment plant may go into a body of water that has an intake some distance downstream. (In rare cases, the output of sewage treatment goes right into the freshwater intake, but this is rare.)
When you run your faucet, the meter is measuring how much water you use, and then you are billed for both the costs to make the water safe to drink, and usually also the costs to make your sewage safe for the environment.
In the city I live in the water comes from 4 places. In the mountains to the west and south east massive water storage dams have been built that get filled by rain, there is a large river to the south that supplies some water it originates at a volcanic lake far to the south, there are also ground water wells that pump water out of , and waste water is also recycled back into the system. All these sources are fed into the water treatment plants and from there fed into the pipe network that supplies your sink and shower.
Some cities also have desalination plants to feed water in, but that is very expensive and the city I live in has sufficient water resources without it.
The used water here goes to sewage treatment plants that seperate the water from the waste and the water is discharged into the sea or piped back to the water treatment plant at the start.
When water is “wasted” it is the water sitting in reservoirs that is being wasted they are not unlimited supplies and only fill at a certain rate over time. Where I live we occasionally get water rationing orders when there is insufficient rain.
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