It is sunny today so far, but a quick look at Calistoga weather shows rain every day this week except Friday.
Could use some relief from my 61% state mandated water use reduction. Would be nice to shower.
No shit!
We cut our water usage significantly by hand washing dishes rather than using the dishwater and by only using the washing machine at full load.
Hmmm… a non-ancient dishwasher uses something like 4-6 gallons to wash a load of dishes. I can’t hand wash (and adequately rinse) a full dishwasher-load’s worth of dishes using pnly 4-6 gallons of water. Of course, running a dishwasher only half-full (or even less) is wasteful, as it uses the same 4-6 gallons regardless of load size.
Landscape irrigation can use a surprisng amount of water, and is a good place to start when looking to reduce water usage.
when customers cut water use as requested, some water districts raised prices since revenues went down!
I had thought we’d get a lot of rain this winter, but the storms would be warm and might not do as much for snowpack. The (relatively for California) cold weather during this last month of storms has been terrific for reducing drought, skiing, and relative lack of destruction caused by the storms. I hope it continues.
That’s exactly what happened here. We were asked to conserve and then the rates went up to cover the cost to them of our conservation. When my revenues drop I am forced to cut costs since I do not monopolize the tool market.
Really? Who has the same high quality tools and provides the level of expertise as you do?
The cost to get the water out of the ground is a small portion of the rates. Most of this is the labor, maintenance, and equipment depreciation. So a utility comes up with a rate based upon these totals and divides by the amount of water to be distributed to give you a cost of $/100 gallons.
Typically overhead is more or less fixed year after year. When consumption drops, revenue drops but overhead remains. In order to meet overhead the rates increase.
There is nothing like market pricing in a utility. Typically no reason to innovate or cut overhead where possible since everything is passed on to the consumer.
Yeah, I get it. If my revenues drop I take a pay cut. I know a kid who is a mechanic for the Sonoma County Water Agency. One of 25 mechanics. His pay after beni’s is $163k. Some of the guys make more than $200k. Then there is Maintenance Worker I and Maintenance Worker II all making $100k+, Lead Mechanics, Engineers, Managers etc. Hundreds of employees with every one of them earning anywhere from $120k to $300k annually. Everyone has had an increase in salary each of the past 3 years. That’s rough. What drought?
In comparison the highest earning fleet mechanics for Santa Rosa max out at $104k after beni’s. Base pay is 30% lower than the Water Agency Mechanics. Rate increase my ass.