Boil Water Notice for City of Houston
mailchi.mp
mailchi.mp
(1) Is there much daylight between unsafe to drink and unsafe to shower/etc. IE, is there such a thing as nonpotable water that's still OK for domestic use?
(2) If there is such a thing, are there major cost or environmental savings to be had from running a nonpotable water grid?
My thinking is that treating water at home is not that hard. You can easily have one filtered tap at home. It's cheap and easy to retrofit.
Is it not overkill/inefficient to run a drinking water grid when 99% of the water waters lawns and washes dishes?
I mean, define 'filtered'. A brita-type filter will do precisely nothing for most things that require a boil notice (nor will it do anything for most heavy metal contaminants etc).
In general, "filtered" taps primarily remove chlorine and calcium carbonate, mostly for taste reasons.
Doing actual water treatment at home is not going to be particularly economic or safe.
Well, it might do something, give a nice warm and humid substrate for bacterias to develop
(They are water intensive - I would reconsider that if I still lived in California)
2) Assuming you're in a climate where this makes sense, the easiest source of non-potable water is to simply collect rainwater, so you don't really need a grid for this. In the other direction, use of "grey water" (domestic non-sewage wastewater) for purposes like irrigation is also increasingly common.
Have you ever gone swimming in a natural body of water?
Certainly. As a kid in 60s/70s, when in India we washed, brushed teeth etc with tap water (were careful not to swallow any!) but only drank water that had been boiled or otherwise treated (the fetish for plastic bottles of water had thankfully not developed anywhere yet). This was visiting relatives, so it's not the case that our guts had adapted to the local intestinal flora.
I think there's an economy of scale of running a single pipe of potable water to each location rather than running (and maintaining) a dual system, which would have "leakage" (both the physical kind, which is normal, but would occur 2X, and the case of people accidentally drinking from the wrong pipe).
Isolation rooms are negatively pressured to keep bad stuff from leaving.
in new delhi, india back 7-9 years ago i was living in a pretty garbage area by my normal standards and one of the things we had to be careful about was when to use the water pump. do it during off time and the water from the tap would be green, it would stink and taste like vomit. that was a really really terrible experience and bad living standards. unless you are poor and cannot afford any other reasonably okay living place, one should not be living in those conditions.
??? Are you actually saying poor people do not deserve clean water?