All new homes have tankless water heater so it’s the same as instant hot water.
@jshain - when I was a master gardener we would encourage people with automatic sprinkler systems to use them only once a week, if needed. And to run them 20 - 30 minutes. Water deeply and less frequently and you encourage deeper root growth even in grass.
We have a tankless hot water heater. It still takes 2 minutes plus to get hot water because we do not have a hot water circulator (yet).
I just recently was reminded of this and thanks for reinforcing it again. Instead of running 20-30 minutes all at once I think I will run consecutive cycles back-to-back, once per week, in order to allow the water to be absorbed more slowly. I also start my watering at 3 or 4 AM so we don’t get unnecessary evaporation during daylight hours.
No, tankless hot water heaters actually take longer for water to heat up unless there are also supplemental systems.
I don’t know the specific but I think 1 or 2 minutes at most that I have to wait.
Depends on how big your house is and how far away the hot water heater is from the particular tap. If you have a small one right next to the tap in addition to the main one, you can have instant hot water.
Ah! I meant the tankless hot water heaters that are local to the faucets, not the central ones, though perhaps the water circulator makes a fine alternative.
I’m guessing MIL wasted many thousands of gallons of water over 50 years waiting for hot water to arrive.
Hoping they can water newly planted plants in the yard.
Half of Californians live in multi-unit buildings. Many of them never see a water bill and have no incentive to conserve. There are new proposals to either put in sub meters and bill the tenants directly or to amend rent control to allow landlords to pass on the water bills to the tenants.
Multi-unit buildings actually use far less water than single family homes, because landscaping is a huge consumer of water. (The average San Franciscan uses about 40 gallons a day. Suburbs, far more.)
My solution to the water crisis in California is draconian. I think the state government should appropriate all water rights by eminent domain (with compensation). ALL. Surface and subterranean rights. Then water should be re-allocated. Reasonable allocations should be given to agricultural, wildlife, city dwellers, etc. California agriculture uses huge amounts of water, much of it wastefully. There is no reason to grow rice by flooding fields in a desert. It simply does not make sense. Of course, getting to an agreement on reallocation would probably result in wars within the CA statehouse, if not worse. But the idea that water rights belong to individual landowners, rather than being a shared resource, simply doesn’t make sense.
I also would like to see the various aqueducts covered. Uncovered streams of water flowing through a desert result in huge amounts of evaporative loss.
Many studies have already been done on evaporative loss and the reality is that covering it is cost prohibitive. Arizona’s “CAP” has also been studied for evaporation and covering it would simply be too costly.
Part of the possible cause of the draught
http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/22/us/pacific-ocean-blob/index.html
Tankless water heaters are great on paper, but in northern climates they don’t work very well, they have to struggle to make up the temperature differential between the water coming in and the desired temperature. In places like California and Arizona, where it is warm, they probably work great, and with a circulating pump probably will reduce water usage.
And yes, a lot of water is wasted. Some towns have ordinances against having things like rain barrels and cisterns, not because they attract mosquitoes (that can be taken care of with covers and screens, to keep the mosquitoes from laying eggs in there), but rather, for esthetic reasons. In my area, a lot of water comes from ground water wells, and they have had problems with water levels, even with decent rainfall, and part of this is the stupidity of towns in the burbs where I live. Those lush green lawns, besides the obvious problems with fertilizer and chemicals, also in terms of water is about as permeable as concrete, so what happens is it rains, and the water instead of leeching down into the ground and getting into the groundwater and artesian layers, runs off into the street, where it goes to the treatment plant and into the river, and is lost. Yet towns actually have ordinances requiring that a certain percentage of your house be lawn, and if you for example had your front yard totally beds and such, or a wildflower garden (which among other things, tend to be drought resistant), you can be heavily fined. In some towns near me, it is illegal to use groundwater wells to irrigate your lawn or beds (I can understand drinking water, for a lot of reasons).
There is no reason to grow rice by flooding fields in a desert>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Crazy! Seriously.