Water is something we take for granted. Reading the news from National Geographic this morning, I was horrified to read the stats about water consumption. Cape Town is just one of the cities around the world that is facing major water shortages. They say by mid April the Taps will be switched off!
With population growth, over development and climate change, the balance of available water and water reserves has hit crises levels. With bottled water traders already putting up the price of drinking water and 'water theft' petrols being set up to guard natural springs, we can anticipate major social problems if water rationing is made compulsory.
Water is a subject we talk about quite a bit in our family because we live on a boat. This means, we have to collect the water we use, we have to carry drinking water and we always have to think about where our next lot of water is coming from.
In Cape town voluntary consumption has already been requested by the city. Consumption should be limited to 50 litres a day. If everyone can do this, the crisis might be temporarily avoided, but easier said than done. Apparently 50 litres is one sixth of the average consumption of most Americans. Really? To put that in perspective, I live on a boat and have a tank which holds 300 litres of water. This lasts us (2 of us and the dog) two weeks (excluding showers).
I thought it might be opportune to share some of our water saving policies that we use on the boat. You never know when they might come in useful. Firstly our loos are flushed with seawater ... so that is not going to be an option for most of you. May be rain water could be used instead. Our first rule of use is not to run the tap. Get used to the temperature it comes out of the tap because if the pipe leading from the heater to the tap is 5m , you will be wasting a fair few litres every time you turn the tap on.
My favourite rule is to wash up only when necessary ..... doing everything in one go, using the smallest amount of water in a bowl saves bucket loads of water. We could collect rain water for washing up .... something you are not likely to be able to do at this time of year in Cape town, but certainly possible for most at certain times of the year. If you have plants ... they would really appreciate rain water, as do your animals, and this, of course is an option for your toilets is you don't have a handy supply of sea water nearby.
On our house boat in the UK, we don't currently collect rainwater and we have a bath! (Although only 1.2meters overall length). So it is interesting to know just how much water we currently use. We are able to fill our tanks from the marina and we just come in to do that when we need to. We have a 30 litre hot water tank so if two of us can have a bath, every 2 days, we reckon our total water usage is 20 litres per person per day. We then drink at least 2 litres a day of bottled water. We use our tank water for the kettle and for cooking. We have a carbon filter on the kitchen tap to make sure it is clean. Most of our clothes washing is not included in the figures here as we are able to use a land based laundry. But still ... we are averaging 15 days of water to equal one day of an average American! I am pleased with that and think this is a great beginning to our 'self sufficient' lifestyle.
We have begun planning our new systems for sailing as we want to be much more self sufficient when traveling around the Med. We will have a desalinator which turns seawater into drinking water and we will have a rain collection tank for washing up and showering off outside. If you have read "The Life Of Pi by Yann Martel" you will remember he had a simple desalination device (I haven't checked this option out), I believe ours will have to be operated by a generator and will create 20 litres an hour. I need to work out how much diesel that will consume! It seems water is never FREE!
Being on a boat certainly makes you think about everything you do and how you do it. It makes you much more mindful of your resources.
