Sculpture in front of the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum
We actually had some gray clouds of our own over the weekend and got a whopping 0.3 inches of rain at my house. I’ll take anything I can get at this point. League City has gone to a “no watering whatsoever” policy due to the ongoing drought. I want to follow the rules but I also don’t want the plants in my backyard to die so here’s my solution: I showered with a bucket sitting on the floor over the weekend and made Jose do the same. One shower is enough to fill the bucket with a couple gallons of water, so that’s 4-5 gallons of water per day that I can get in a legitimate manner since we’re going to shower, obviously, and if I wasn’t catching it in a bucket, it’d just be going down the drain.
I amuse myself with my overkill stealth-watering plan.
(Speaking of the watering ban, I have taken much amusement from the comments on League City’s Facebook page. Let’s just say people are irrationally irate that they can’t fill their swimming pools or wash their cars. There are also people worried about not being able to water their foundation, which I will admit is a slightly more rational concern. Still, it’s amazing to see the number of people who don’t appear to understand what “severe drought” means.)
Now that I am in the Safety division, our weekly division meeting always begins with a safety topic or case study. Today’s was a look at what caused the 2009 Washington DC metro crash and what could have been done to prevent it. This was timely considering I was just riding that metro a week ago…so I’m glad that safety topic came up AFTER our trip and not before.
Work is a bit crazy at the moment. I have way too much to do between now and the end of September, although on the plus side the next 6 weeks will be nicely split by a full week of vacation with friends. Still, having too much to do is a nice contrast to what I’ve experienced at other points in my career so having too much to do should be taken as simply a statement of fact rather than a complaint.
I tackled my next sewing project over the weekend — making a replacement for the laundry bag that fits in our hamper. I washed the old bag once and it shrank so much that it never fit around the rim of the hamper again. You’d think that making a new one would be easy enough…and it wasn’t the sewing that got me but rather my (lack of) measuring skills. I made an entire new bag and it looked great, but when I tried it out and it was still too small. Sewing fail!
The watering the foundation thing is a legitimate concern. Don’t water your grass, worse case is you resod, a few thousand dollars, within reason for most homeowners. Don’t water your foundation (esp an older home) and it cracks, most insurance companies no longer cover cracked foundations, and you’ve effectively totaled your house, it costs tens of thousands to repair and no one will buy your house from you until you fix it. It seems unreasonable to have a total ban on that. We’ve been reasonably watering our foundation every few weeks, and we’ve still kept under the 3000 gallons that’s the minimum amount of water you can buy from the city. On the other hand, a sprinkler system typically uses 15,000 gallons or more a month, which I think should be criminal even without a drought. Anyway. In the meantime, I had a broken pipe, I reported it to the city, they told me it was my problem, so I fixed it, but left the hole there because there was a small drip that still needed to be patched up (mind you, still not enough of a leak to go over the minimum 3000 gallons we all have to pay for) and just got a note that unless its fixed in 5 days, they are going to fine me $500/day.
End rant.
See, I know that watering your foundation is something you’re supposed to do. And yet I’ve never heard anyone I know have a problem with their foundation due to not watering it. Not saying that it doesn’t happen, and not saying it wouldn’t be a HUGE financial and logistical issue…just that I wonder how widespread the issue really is.
As for the leak, I’ve got no problem with the city telling you to fix it. That’s what they *should* be doing whether we’re in a drought or not. I get that it’s small so I understand the annoyance, but I’m ok with the city being diligent on that. (Although I also remember you saying they basically didn’t care about the leak the first few times you called, which means they weren’t really being diligent…until now. Which is dumb.)
Oh — how do you water your foundation? Did you guys bury a soaker hose or something?
Here’s my chaige the universe though. Maybe they should actually RATION water. Let every house have 1000 gallons per month per person, and then just shut off the water after that. Then if some people want to take baths and long showers instead of watering their foundations they can..
Jose had an idea to let people water their lawns, wash cars, etc with non-potable water. (They do that at my family’s farm.) It’s probably too logistically complicated to implement that kind of system…it’d take years and lots of money. But still not a bad idea.
I think foundation cracks are a bigger problem with the older way of pouring slabs not with newer, but they are very common when ground gets dry (I visited several houses with them when I house shopped and immediately rejected). We just hose down the edge of house when ground gets so dry it pulls away from foundation. Note: I nearly never water water the grass, it’s way more resilient than most people who water multiple times a week realize.
The thing that annoys me about the fine is that they only know about the leak because of my repeated calls over two months asking them to come look at it, before they determined it was on my side of the water meter. But I go and fix the leak myself (it turns out it was gushing a reasonable amount of water) not to mention since leak is on my side of meter I am theoretically paying for leaking water, and it still has one drip and they order me to fix it in five days?? If I had just filled in the hole they would have never noticed, but since I responsibly left it open to fix the last drip. Try getting a plumber out for a minor leak in less than five days.. Couldn’t get the city out for two months.
I’ve heard from geologist Ph.D.’s that watering foundations is hogwash.
Raised in CA, I grew up conserving everything. When we had a couple of bad droughts, we saved water from showers for the yard by standing in a bucket.
Also, lived by the toilet slogan, ” If it’s yellow, it’s mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down.”
I promise I’m not a hippie.
You might want to change to a env friendly shampoo and soap if you’re using grey water on your plants. Normal soap can be pretty bad for them. Plus, it’s bad for that stuff to get into the ground water without being cleaned.
So, Liz, you totally made me ask Prof Google on watering foundations. After going past people who have businesses of watering foundations, I found mixed opinions:
http://www.profengineering.com/faq.htm
http://www.foundationwatering.com/tamu.aspx
http://www.hobb.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1289&Itemid=197
http://extension.missouri.edu/drought/waterfoundation.htm