Ask Lemmy

well, considering Poseidon lives in the ocean, it'd track that he'd have a kink for getting "wet and wild"

Yeah drain field saturation is a pain in the dick when in an area with high water table or very claey soils. We're lucky as our volcanic soil is coarse and just sucks water away so drain field problems are basically nonexistent.

Hope they get hooked up to city sewer. Sounds like their local area and well water quality would greatly benefit.

yes, 8-10yr between emptying it. It's a fairly large tank (1800gal iirc?) for a small family. The last time we had it done the local guy said it looked great and there weren't any problems. so something must be working right.

however a rental with a smaller tank constantly had problems with clogging. find out tenant was from california and brought all their water saving fixtures with them and took military style showers so the tank never got any real thru-flow. plus was a very heavy tp user... yeah. gotta have water moving, put original fixtures on and told them to start throwing their tp in a trash can. no problems since.

No.

My city flooded because we had too much of it and big rains hit. The dam had to be released which swelled the river and spilled into suburbs along it.

In hindsight, we all should've been under direction to waste as much water possible in the months leading up to it.

tl;dr/conclusion: just flush your urine. this post isn't accounting for the increased used of cleaning products caused by urine stains, so really all of these numbers are even lower than they appear. if you actually want to reduce carbon emissions and energy usage, your energy is better spent on political actions. and if you insist on reducing consumption, stop buying avocados and turn off your air conditioning - that's gonna have magnitudes more of an effect than not flushing.

Let's do the math. Average toilet uses about 1.6 gallons (0.00606 m³) of water per flush *ᵃ. Flushing doesn't actually use energy, but it takes energy to both

1) treat the water before it gets to your house and

2) to pump that water to your house

It takes about 1 kWh to treat 1,000 gallons of water (3.785 m³) *ᵇ. That translates to about 0.0016 kWh per 1.6 gallons (0.00606 m³). So it takes 0.0016 kWh in order to treat the amount of water your toilet flushes in a single flush.

It takes about 3,300 kWh to pump 1 million gallons of water (3785 m³) *ᶜ. That translates to about 0.00528 kWh per 1.6 gallons (0.00606 m³). So it takes 0.00528 kWh in order to pump that 1.6 gallons (0.00606 m³) of water per flush.

If we add those two together, we get 0.00688 kWh needed to pump and treat the water every time you flush. Let's try and put that amount of energy into reference.

Microwaves use about 1000 watts (1 kW) when running. Therefore, 0.00528 kWh could run a microwave for about 0.318 minutes (or about 19 seconds)

Computer Desktop: Assuming a desktop consumes around 400 watts, 0.00528 kWh would power it for roughly 0.0132 hours (or about 47 seconds)

Toasting Bread: A toaster might use around 1 kW of power. Therefore, 0.00528 kWh could power a toaster for about 0.32 minutes (around 19 seconds)

So, let's see how much energy we would save if every single household in America flushed one time less per day. There are about 125.7 million households in the US *ᵈ. That would translate to about 864,816 kWh per day, assuming every household flushed exactly once less than they usually do. Let's put that figure into reference.

In 2022 the total US consumption of electricity was 4,271.88 TWh *ᵉ which is about 11.7 billion kWh per day. This means that if everybody flushed one time less (meaning 864,816 kWh less), it would reduce total energy consumption by about 0.0074%.

Bitcoin globally consumes around 150 TWh per year *ᶠ, which translates to approximately 411 million kWh per day. 864,816 kWh represents about 0.21% of the total energy spent on Bitcoin mining per day.

Air conditioning consumes approximately 6% of the energy in the US *ᵍ. Since we know that total US consumption in a year is 4,271.88 TWh, that translates to about 702.23 million kWh per day. 864,816 kWh represents about 0.123% of the total energy spent on A/C per day.

sources

a: https://www.savingwater.org/indoors/toilets/how-much-water-does-your-toilet-use/

b: https://www.esmap.org/sites/default/files/esmap-files/FINAL_EECI-WWU_TR001-12_Resized.pdf--

c: https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/water/us-water-supply-and-distribution-factsheet

d: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/HSD410222

e: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_United_States#Electricity_consumption

f: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

g: https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/air-conditioning

It still wouldn't compare, fortunately.

And I'm a woman with very thick, long hair. I wash it, condition it, mask it. I scrub the budding calluses on my feet and moisturize, then I shave most of my body.

Granted, hour-long showers only happen once a week, because I only wash my hair once a week, so my everyday showers are more like 30 min, but you'll rip those hour-long ones away over my dead body.

K but if you're drinking water regularly, you're going to be peeing regularly. So you're probably not leaving it to sit for hours. Flush every two pees and it's no problem!