Is Dallas in a drought? (home, to buy, store)

[GoPadge]

Originally Posted by lh_newbie

...and 4.5 inches ahead for the year doesn't negate the shortage for the last 2 years.

The average usage in Dallas is 250 gallons per person per day. That's outrageous. I have been recording our usage and have done many things to limit our usage. By looking at our house/lawn/etc, you would have no idea that we use substantially less than that. We use 113 gal/person/day. As Momof2 stated, watering once a week is just fine for our region. That's what we do. I also break up my watering into three separate "feedings" in that one day - once at midnight, once at 1:30am, once at 3:00am. By running each zone 1/3 of the total watering time, 3 times in one night, I have minimized runoff to ensure most of the water I put down gets soaked into the ground.

I believe San Antonio's average is 170 gal/day/person. That's 80 gals less (32%) than Dallas average.

That's crazy, we have four kids who are homeschooled, we're having to add an inch of water to our 9' x 9' hottub every week and we only use an average of 140 gallons a day. (And I thought that was out rageous.)

[rantanamo]

There has to be something to that stat as it seems outrageous. Perhaps the huge influx of people from other regions compared to San Antonio who don't really know the native vegetation. Different way of measuring usage here vs SA. Smaller household sizes here?(I would think smaller households use more water) It just seems odd that 270 miles up I-35E things are so much different.

[lh_newbie]

Originally Posted by socketz

With a majority of the globe covered in water, it seems that someone would come up with low cost desalinization product and a method to pump seawater into remote areas through a ducted system.

Uh... pumping sea water into remote areas? You're suggesting pumping water up hill... which is a VERY energy intensive task. Dallas is over 600 ft above sea level. I'd hate to see what that water would cost.

Incidentally, desalination isn't nearly as expensive as it used to be. It's the pumping costs that make seawater non feasible beyond a very short distance from the ocean...

[lh_newbie]

Originally Posted by GoPadge

That's crazy, we have four kids who are homeschooled, we're having to add an inch of water to our 9' x 9' hottub every week and we only use an average of 140 gallons a day. (And I thought that was out rageous.)

I've done a little reasearch instead of just tossing around a statistic. The 250 gal/day/person is not just their residential usage, it's the total water usage of an area divided by it's population, so it includes water you use while eating our for dinner, drinking coffee at work and irrigating the park in your neighborhood.

I've tried to find a statistic of "average home usage" to no avail...

GoPadge - Are you saying 140 gal/day/person in your house? Assuming you + wife + 4 kids, that's 6 x 140 x 30 = 25,200. That does seem like quite a bit, but you do have 5 of the people at home while you're at work. What is your timing on your irrigation? Typically, that's the largest water use in a home. Some people water 10-15 minutes every day!

[Synopsis]

My sprinkler system is set for 10 minutes twice a week. But, we haven't had to use it at all this spring because of the amount of rain. My yard is so saturated right now I need pontoons on my lawnmower!

[socketz]

http://www.evilwhiteguy.com/blog/images/redneckmower.jpg (broken link)

[lh_newbie]

My lawn needs to be mowed badly... but it's just too wet!

[socketz]

We need to bookmark this thread so we can return to it in August, when it is hot and dry and we are praying for rain.

[sonshinelife]

Outside service just came to mow our common area and the grass in my opinion was much too wet to do. Now their are tire marks . I don't know much about grass but I'd think that mowing while the grass still is so heavy with water would hurt the grass. Anybody know if this is the case?

[Synopsis]

Originally Posted by socketz

We need to bookmark this thread so we can return to it in August, when it is hot and dry and we are praying for rain.

Good point socketz, but if I remember correctly you are new to the area right? The amount of rain we're having this spring may very well bring us a wet summer as well. This spring reminds me of 2004, when it rained quite a bit (even more this spring than then).

In 2004, I was working at Siemens in Arlington and we had a couple of German Expats working in the cubes next to me. They would ask about the summer and I would tell them, "Man you are in for the shock of your life come summer; it is truly brutal here." Well summer came and went and they kept asking me (or good-natured taunting was more like it) "When is this Texas summer that you speak of going to arrive?" with grins on their faces.

Due to the rain we had that spring, the summer was WAAAAY cooler than normal. I remember several days on end in July and August where it would never get out of the mid 80s. Upper 80s to low 90s were the norm, and it rained off and on all summer long. I think we had one or two days where it got above 100 degrees all summer long.

So, I'm willing to hedge my bets and say that this summer is going to be relatively mild. It's friggin' June (almost) and we've rarely gotten above 85 or 86 degrees (yesterday was 77!). In past years, we've already gone into the mid (even upper) 90s by April.

I love the picture of the lawnmower. Makes me think of a redneck riding mower, or something to that effect.