Comment by pluto_modadic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pluto_modadic | Hacker News Reader

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"far cheaper than providing large amounts" that doesn't factor in the cost of plumbing an entire town with 3 sets. remember photos of the tangle of wires when DC vs AC fought? It's more expensive especially for a suburb of single family homes to plumb in sewers and water mains (long distances for low flows), vs plumbing in duplexes and apartments.

having a secondary water system (e.g., purple pipes / grey water), for general lawn/washing and one for drinking/cooking - strikes a good balance. You don't want your potable water system to move too slowly.

You also should have water towers at different heights (higher pressure in the potable system). any accidental interconnects (these do happen) will flow /away/ from the potable one.

finally, letting people use rainwater, runoff, and letting them recycle lightly used potable water for other uses (like flushing toilets, watering gardens) is good - try to get every liter of water used twice as a goal.

bonus: get past the ick factor and allow your sewage to be re-used (purple pipes) as the greywater after treatment at the plant.

It is about bottom 2 billion not having safe drinking water. They are surely not having suburban homes with 3 sets of pipes. Its a one water pump + some filtration/cleaning mechanism for few thousand people who come there and collect it type situation.

> remember photos of the tangle of wires when DC vs AC fought?

This sounds like someone confused a picture of early telegraph poles with multiple circuits, before high density cables were developed.

You’re right it would be crazy to pipe clean water to our homes for drinking and deliver less clean water via ditch for irrigation. No wait, that’s perfectly sane, normal and common.

You don't need any plumbing for safe drinking water. It can be delivered to the customer in gallons and bottles. That's how it's done in large parts of the world.

But is that more efficient than having one set of plumbing with safe drinking water? I doubt it. Over here the price difference between drinking water from the tap and the cheapest bottled water is a factor ~200.

refillable water bottles are how it's done in most of the world.

You go to a water shop, hand over a bottle, and they give you a one filled with a 15 liters of water, and you'll probably pay around 5 USD cents for that. The water will be filtered (but probably not with reverse osmosis, so there might still be a few viruses and a little lead contamination in it).

The bottles will be filled thousands of times in their lifespan. The cost is higher per liter than piped water, but per person per year it's lower, due to the fact these people perhaps use only 5 liters per day of bottled water, and do clothes washing in non-potable rainwater off their roof.

Hell, I do this for my drinking water in the United States. My tap water is perfectly safe to drink, but even after running through a brita filter it tastes aweful, so it's worth the 30 minutes a month it takes to got get RO filtered water from the water store.

What's actually cheaper is not bottled water, it's a village well.

And what water do you think a poor person will prefer to drink:

a) Some of the highest quality drinking water in the world, taken from a regional or national spring and delivered to their home for a very accessible price?

or

b) Slightly muddy well water that they have to go and fetch in a village well? Assuming they live in a village and assuming that there's ground water available.

Which water would you prefer to drink?

The comment I was replying to was talking about plumbing, so my response regarded settlements larger than villages. Any village where the ground water is good to drink have already dug a well, so no use in telling them to dig a well.

I'd prefer to drink Dom Pérignon and eat off golden plates, but I don't always get what I want.

There are vast degrees of poverty of availability or unavailability of infrastructure, across both the developed and developing world.

Shipping in bottled water, for instance, isn't a solution when the cost of shipping into the area (due to poor road infrastructure, or poor weather, or conflict zones) has prohibitive - or even intermittent - problems.

People already live around sources of water. At the scale of a township, it's generally long-term cheaper to figure out how to make your sources of water potable than to introduce a permanent dependency on a distant third party supplier, and a complex logistic network for something as fundamental as drinking water.

> ...delivered to their home for a very accessible price?

> ...have to go and fetch from a village well.

If someone can figure out to 'very accessibly' deliver bottled water from hundreds of miles away to your home, why wouldn't they be able to 'very accessibly' deliver locally sourced water to your home?

And if you have to go from your home to a distribution center for those bottles, how is that better than the proverbial village well?

Here is the reality: In large parts of the world, very high quality drinking water is available in large, reusable jars and bottles, for a cheap price which poor people can afford. While the tap water ranges from undrinkable to bad tasting.

Now you might think that it is outrageous that they buy and drink this water, that they don't deserve it and should wait for plumbing or better government water treatment. That they should be denied one of the basics of life in the holy name of hacker efficiency. Do you think they give a fuck about what you think? You are literally arguing to take away people's good drinking water because they live somewhere with lacking infrastructure.

> If someone can figure out to 'very accessibly' deliver bottled water from hundreds of miles away to your home, why wouldn't they be able to 'very accessibly' deliver locally sourced water to your home?

Because locally sourced water is not of the same quality or even drinkable many times. A river or a spring is in a fixed place geographically and not everybody can live on top of it. If you lived an hour or two from a large spring with high quality water, you wouldn't want to drink foul-tasting water from the tap or try to dig a well for some brackish water.

> And if you have to go from your home to a distribution center for those bottles, how is that better than the proverbial village well?

They deliver it to your door and with your permission they will cary the jars into your home and put them wherever you tell them to.

> Over here the price difference between drinking water from the tap and the cheapest bottled water is a factor ~200.

Does it take the cost of building city-wide plumbing installation and the water treatment facility into account? Someone (probably the government) have to pay for it and many 3rd world nations can't afford to pay for them except for a handful of cities (usually the capital city).

I remember reading that in some Western countries up to half of the ultra clean drinking water disappears because of leaking pipes...

What does it matter if it's more efficient or not? I want to drink clean water today, I get a gallon delivered to my home.

Also, when comparing prices for necessities, the only thing that matters to an individual is the actual amount, not any percentage comparison. You've fallen into a mental trap that I've seen a lot of people fall into, by comparing prices by percentages. If most people in a developing country can easily afford clean water delivered to their homes, then it doesn't matter if it's percentage wise more expensive. Same thing if you buy some ramen noodles. It doesn't matter in the slightest if they cost 50c or $1.

Because we're not talking about what it costs for an individual, we're talking about how to get clean water to everyone in the world.

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