Hi dj and Brisnat
Brisnat you say:"Using your logic that seems to keep coming out, we should keep our 20l/min shower heads and 11L single flush toilets, keep hosing our driveways and letting the taps run needlessly."
and you dj say:"This is not correct it's more like 20 or even 100 litres... plus if I started thinking this way I will also keep open the tap while brushing teeth and so on!"
I say:"Not at all." It neither says that in the study nor did I apply that kind of logic. Laundry makes up a fraction of overall household water consumption. In my household, our regular TL (7.5 kg capacity, 150 L per regular cycle), roughly accounts for 10% of all water used. Everything else (yes, I have water saving taps, showerheads, cisterns etc.), accounts for the rest. Here in Sydney, our household is large - usually more than 6 people. We average one full laundry load per day. If I were to use a front loader of same capacity, I would not save much more than 6% overall.
We are not a regular household due our size, yet, I doubt that most other (smaller) households would exceed this 10% figure (at least not for the sake of my argument). Switching to a front loader - taking into account different capacities, frequency of use and all the other stuff - other households would very likely achieve savings ranging from as little as 3% and generally not more than 7%. Now, even if all of Brisbane's housholds changed to front loaders - it still wouldn't save your water problem by any more than those single digit percentiles. In fact, I recon they should start mandating twin-tubs and make people re-use their wash water more than thrice ;oP.
Instead of feeling guilty about using water, what we really need to do is get up our politicians and water companies, instead of splitting hairs over a few hundred megaliters - out of how many trillion liters? Apparently, domestic water cosnsumption makes up less than 20% of all fresh water used around the country. Strangely enough, there are no reliable and consistent figures available to accurately quantify what I've discussed in the above paragraphs. One would think that our governement should want such information before they go out wasting our hard-earned money on their rebate schemes.
South East Queensland's population growth has been on a runaway train and a lot of money has changed hands as a result. Though, none of it has been used to create the necessary infrastructure to meet new demands and fortify SE Queensland against the drought cycle - which, btw, is breaking. There are a lot of areas in NE NSW and SE Queensland, where rain falls regularly - even when much of the country is in drought. Unfortunately for Brisbane, your main water catchement happens to be in the wrong spot at present.
If we can be ingenious enough to transport oil and gas over thousands of miles, surely we can find a workable solution to Brisbane's water problems, that doesn't involve desalination plants and other stop gap nonsense.
dj - there has been quite a bit of development going on in the TL department. Technology hasn't stood still outside of Europe either. TLs now come with all kinds of features to reduce their load on the environment. This seems to be a point lost in these discussions for some reason. On a related note, did I mention that my washer can sudsave? If I used that function, I could reduce our overall water consumption by a whopping 2 or 3 percent.
Anyways that's all for now folks.
Take care
rapunzel
))) THANK YOU so much... I need indeed of informations like these...
