Sunday, April 12, 2015

How many showers will fill a swimming pool?

Matthew E. Kahn tells us on his environmental blog:
Filling Swimming Pools During a Time of Drought I live in West Los Angeles in a neighborhood where 75% of the homes have private swimming pools (we don't one). Here is a home for sale and it has a pool. In the midst of California drought, I asked myself a deep question. How many gallons of water does it take to fill a pool? Google provided me with this website and for the fictitious pool that I created this website told me that it needs 36,000 gallons to be full. Residential water is currently priced at roughly .5 cents per gallon in Los Angeles. This website says that a pool owner should change his water every 7 years. So, a pinch of algebra suggests that the annual water cost of pool ownership is; 36000*.5/7 cents per year or $25.7 dollars per year. That strikes me as a low current price.

OK, I pick a number from Home Water Works:
The average American shower uses 17.2 gallons
Let me see, that is 36,000/17 and divide that by 7 years we get 303 showers a year. Great, I can have five or six pools!

No comments: