Some background:
A home I do the plumbing for suffered a catastrophic leak some time back and as part of the insurance's requisites for continued coverage, the home required installation of a couple automated shutoffs, two for the 2" domestic feeds, and two for the reverse osmosis systems. As part of the install process, I have access to the monitor/control apps.
I have to say- the home is for two people. It is over 10,000 square feet. It has five fucking ice makers. It has six bathrooms. I've worked in every single one of them.
So anyway, I'm sitting here at ten forty five pm, watching one of the RO valves tick off the gallons used since install. I'm currently setting use parameters and hitting my vape (I am clocked in and making double time- I have to have all of this stuff set up and turned over to the owner for insurance agent to verify by 9 tomorrow).
It was installed around 3pm today. It has used nearly 100 gallons as of this posting, in a period of 7 hours. That's just ONE of the RO system valves. There's TWO of them here. So double it. 800 gallons a day. Times 30 days. And that's before the systems have had any demand put on them. Twenty two (ish?) thousand gallons a month, so that these boogie fucks can have ice for their highball, and a spot free rinse for their Maybach.
That's not counting the water used on irrigation, or filling their hot tub and pool, and whatever else the rich do with the water. I assume they just turn the hose on, toss it in the yard and let it run, because there can. I'll post the big valve's numbers in a day or two when the valves exit their learning phase.
Where I am, e we get our water from surface means only; rivers, lakes, reservoirs etc. ground water is brackish due to proximity to the Gulf of Mexico. Where I live, our combined reserves are 12% of its original capacity. The city here has publicized when they expect to hit Emergency Level 1, which means that there is less than 180 days of water remaining. We expect to hit that Emergency Level in mid 2026. It's 2 weeks from beginning of 2026.
... eat the rich
Where is that water even going?
Reverse osmosis systems usually produce a lot of wastewater, so it's going down the drain.
Exactly right. It is all going down the drain. None of it is recaptured for any sort of use, even though it could be captured in a grey water system as I have my WSPS (water supply protection specialist cert allows grey water design and use).
Absolutely wasteful. Likely not outright intentional, probably just indifferent but the end result is the same. Thousands of wasted gallons.
Oof
Fucking this!!!! 800 gallons per day not including lawn bullshit? WTF are they doing with it? I've been to illicit grow ops that don't use that much water. I've been to very illicit chem ops that don't use that much water. I've done legit commercial work that does use that much water because it's a 150,000 square foot grow operation. How the absolute fuck do you use 800 gallons of water per day as a single family household?! If I did nothing else all day but fill a bucket and then dump it in the yard I don't think I could use 800 gallons a day.
The thing is, it isn't even "used" per se, it just goes down the drain as mineral laden backwash. 800 gallons (or nearly enough for me to call it that comfortably) is just washed down the drain. Every day. Approx 16-18 gallons every hour. 24 hours a day.
That doesn't include the two salt based water softener systems tied in to the two 2" domestic feeds. Those are in 350 gallon resin tanks and takes about 1,100 gallons for each backwash cycle. Granted they only backwash once a week but yet again, another 8,000 gallons monthly, just to backwash. (Resin tanks take roughly 3x their capacity to clean)
It's absurdly infuriating. In a just system, people who do this would be made an example of.
This is fascinating to me. I've done mechanical design for along time now. Plumbing though has always been a mystery. I have a salt based water softener in my house and I have no fucking idea how it works aside from put salt in it then water doesn't smell like chlorine and sulfur anymore. Real ape-brain shit, I know. Do they really flush that much waste water? That's fucking crazy.
It's been years since I helped maintain water softeners, so I might be confusing a step or two, but: Hard water has a calcium ion attached. The inner tank on your softener is full of polystyrene resin beads (most likely) that are given a static charge with a sodium ion. When you turn the tap on in your house, water runs over those beads and the calcium ions in your water swap a sodium for a calcium (so soft water has higher sodium than distilled would)
After a while, the resin runs out of charge. When you run a recharge, the salt tank on your unit fills with water and becomes briny. Then the machine pushes the brine thru the resin tank. The calcium and sodium swap places, and the machine dumps CaCl down your drain as wastewater.
The reason a recharge uses so much water is that the resin tank needs a little extra rinsing to both clear away any residual saltwater, as well as to compress the beads back into a dense configuration so that any water drawn into the household gets good contact with the resin
That's a dead on description.
They do. Some are a little north or south of 3:1, but a very good rule of thumb is 3x whatever the resin tanks water capacity.
Typical all in one units like the grey/black plastic tank where you add salt, with the smaller fiberglass tank inside only hold about 10 gallons of water in the resin tank so come backwash time, it's about 30 gallons.
Fucking yikes. No wonder my water bill is so high. Alternative though is stank water and impossible to clean lime build-up on everything. Impossible to win.
More or less, yeah that's right. You can fiddle with the backwash settings, prolong them so you backwash less often but the trade off is more wear on the power head components, more wear on the resin in the tank, but I dunno if the decreased life of the equipment is worth the cost, despite it all.
I listen to my plumbers. You want to push a 3,000 ton open tower chilled water system to the limit, I'm your comrade. You want to push a residential water softener to the limit, you gotta go talk to my homies because I have no idea. Roof drains? Septics? Grease traps? All black magic to me.
Most home softeners are pretty damn efficient if you give them an accurate hardness setting with proper testing. If you're really interested in water efficiency, find a model that fills the resin tank with a pump instead of via the venturi effect, which is inherently wasteful (but cheaper to build and maintain)
lol
What the fuck does a household need that much softening for. 350 gallons is nuts! Honestly more of a hassle than it's worth -- I would worry about salt-bridging
It has bridged a few times. The brine tank sits behind bollards so it requires pumps and sometimes removing the bollards and getting our skidsteer to hoist it up.