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Comment by lsllc | Hacker News Reader

Well they sort of do already — typically you pay less for water for irrigation (usually because sewerage is metered by water usage and obv if it goes on the lawn it’s not going down the drain).

In places like Florida however irrigation water is reclaimed and not treated the same was as drinking water and has totally separate plumbing and metering (and pricing).

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I'd push back on "typically." In my municipality, they have no way of measuring water used for gardening / lawncare independently from drinking water. So it all gets billed to the same drinking water and sewage rate.

> Well they sort of do already — typically you pay less for water for irrigation (usually because sewerage is metered by water usage and obv if it goes on the lawn it’s not going down the drain).

Aren't you paying more for your lawn water then?

If your sewer bill is based on your water bill[1]: a gallon of water for drinking results in a bill for a gallon of sewage treatment, which you'll use. A gallon of water for irrigation results in a bill for a gallon of sewage treatment which you won't use. Caveats: maybe you pee on the lawn, probably you perspire, sewer pipes are leaky: some of your sewage escapes out, some of your irrigation water escapes in.

[1] this is common, but I don't think anywhere close to universal; even ignoring lack of universal municipal water and lack of universal municipal sewage. Flatrate by connection size is also common. Approximately zero households have individual sewer meters, but some commercial/industrial customers may have them so they can be billed on actual usage.

There's a second meter that tracks the irrigation usage and that's how they subtract the sewer charges for irrigation. Of course you have to pay extra for the meter to be installed and there's often an additional "standing charge" for that extra meter in every bill, but it's usually since the sewer rates are quite high, it's worth doing.

My municipality uses 75% of the water usage (minus the reading from the meter used for irrigation) as the basis for the sewer charge.

So you’re not using the sewer then? Isn’t that completely logical not to pay for it?

Exactly, but they have no easy way of direct metering domestic sewerage usage, so they do it indirectly via your household water usage (usually something like 75% goes down the drains). There needs to be a second meter to "subtract" the irrigation usage from the household usage so you don't get billed for that (and if it's a separate reclaimed water supply, then there's no subtraction, it's just a separate line item).

If you don't have the 2nd meter and your irrigation is running from your domestic water supply, then yes you're absolutely paying for sewerage you're not using.

The number of places in Florida that do that is tiny.

I suppose it depends, but it's pretty common to see signs saying "Non-Potable Reclaimed Water used for Irrigation" in and around housing developments, hotels, shopping and commercial areas as well as resorts and golf courses.

According to this, Florida uses 820M gals of reclaimed water per day although this isn't all necessarily used for irrigation.

https://floridadep.gov/water/domestic-wastewater/content/flo...

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