How much water do you consume daily?

[LuckyLuke]

No apt. meter in the building, Usage estimated based on m2.

Water availability is based on water treatment plants capacity.

This. Always blows my mind. Neuquen doesn't use water meters either. It's all estimated on M2. A couple months ago I noticed some moss growing on the tiles of my outdoor patio floor and stains on the medianera wall with my neighbor. I suspected a leak somewhere. Had a crew of guys digging and breaking the wall for hours. We finally found it coming from somewhere underneath the foundation of the neighbors garage. We went to turn our water off at the street and there was a broken pipe in our access box. Thinking we found the source of the leak we turned our water off. It wasn't the source. We turned the neighbors water off and it stopped the leak. We offered to connect a hose from our patio spigot to the neighbors water tank while they started repairs. They found another leak on the property while installing the new pipes.

In summary, there were 3 leaks between the both of us that nobody knew about because there was no usage meter to tell us. Imagine just how many leaks there are throughout the city.

Meanwhile, I got text messages from the San Antonio, TX Water Department saying that my electric water meter detected "low constant usage" for 3 days straight and to check for a leak. Seeing as the house was vacant, I had someone check on it. The Toilet tank seal was leaking. Amazing technology, leak was detected and fixed right away.

 

[mc kenna]

In Argentina it has always been a catch 22 situation when it comes to water, the reason there is a distrubution of water run by a government company is precisely to ensure potable water safe to consume and prevent water borne pathogens, as we all know, that is not the case.
So the question is, why a person would pay for a service that you are forced to pay when that service does not provide what they are charging you for?
Contaminaded water with no way to know how much to charge you since there's no meter ,it's just the legal form of racketeering that only a government company can get away with.
Also for those that are afraid of suspension of service, know this, a large number of people are hooked up to the water grid with no official connection, back in the day they were called clandestine connections, but now that we became politically correct, they are called irregular connections and there is not penalty for that nor jail time, neither there's a way for the company to ensure that the moment they leave you hook up again.
So i wouldn't lose any sleep over it, wether it's state run or private company, they'll keep providing contaminated water that i wouldn't brush my teeth with.

 

[FrankPintor]

This not having individual meters must be quite common here. One of the first things we had done when we started to build our house was to have a well drilled, so there would be water to mix cement, make concrete, or whatever. The water would also be useful to fill our pool whenever it gets emptied, since in our barrio there are warnings about over-using tap water to fill pools. So we did it, use the well water for the pool, and tap (or bottled) water to drink.

Fast forward to when I was yesterday years old, and noticed a well being drilled on our neighbour's property, where he has a house that was completed over a year ago. So when I saw the architect, I asked him, how on Earth did he build the house with no water? He grinned through his beard and said, since the tap water wasn't metered, he just used it for all his construction needs

BTW, Ivess is good, you can get low-sodium bottles (12 litres still, if I remember correctly) as well. They also have carbonated 2 litre bottles.

 

[FrankPintor]

The topic of water quality has come up over the past few weeks in the news here, particularly with respect to arsenic content:

Cuáles son los distritos bonaerenses más afectados por la presencia de arsénico en el agua de consumo

Un análisis del mapa de la provincia publicado por el Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires (ITBA) reflejó un incremento de los casos durante el último año. Los municipios que figuran en alerta roja y amarilla en muestras de agua de red y pozo. Cómo se realizó el relevamiento a nivel nacional

www.infobae.com

According to the WHO, 10ppb is the safe limit.



We use an Argentinian product, Hidrolit, to filter our tap water:



Filtering 95 - 99% of the arsenic compounds should be enough, I hope.

They’re available on ML, not cheap, but maybe a good investment. We change the filter every 12 months.

 

[retiredbanker]

So who has the government contract to make all the new water meters being installed? At what unit price? And who supplies the workers to dig and install them?

 

[FrankPintor]

So who has the government contract to make all the new water meters being installed? At what unit price? And who supplies the workers to dig and install them?

Do you have any background information on this? I’d be interested to know if they’re going to use IoT to remotely read the meters. It’s unusual to have a whole new greenfield metering network.

 

[Ries]

So who has the government contract to make all the new water meters being installed? At what unit price? And who supplies the workers to dig and install them?

is there really any program to install meters? if so, where? by whom? and who pays?
Doing it in CABA would be unbelievably expensive, and I really doubt a privatized water company would invest in doing construction work in 50,000 150 year old buildings.
For new construction in the suburbs, I could see it, but my experience with how complicated and expensive it is to do minor repairs of utilities in most of the central part of the city is that its something that nobody but the government would pay for.
Its one thing for Edenor to replace a transformer that serves 5000 apartments, which is under the street in a vault a crane can park next to.
But to disturb the ancient pipes in hundreds of thousands of buildings?
This way lies madness.

 

[elhombresinnombre]

Don't most people in CABA already have water meters? Genuine question since all the apartment blocks I've known have had meters with the water charges being apportioned to residents on the basis of sq/m and the houses I know have individual ones facing the street. In fact it was only because of the water meter that we discovered the water leak in late F-I-L's house after he had moved out.

 

[elhombresinnombre]

The topic of water quality has come up over the past few weeks in the news here, particularly with respect to arsenic content:

Cuáles son los distritos bonaerenses más afectados por la presencia de arsénico en el agua de consumo

Un análisis del mapa de la provincia publicado por el Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires (ITBA) reflejó un incremento de los casos durante el último año. Los municipios que figuran en alerta roja y amarilla en muestras de agua de red y pozo. Cómo se realizó el relevamiento a nivel nacional

www.infobae.com

According to the WHO, 10ppb is the safe limit.

View attachment 10700

We use an Argentinian product, Hidrolit, to filter our tap water:

View attachment 10701

Filtering 95 - 99% of the arsenic compounds should be enough, I hope.

They’re available on ML, not cheap, but maybe a good investment. We change the filter every 12 months.

Alternatively, if you anticipate that a family member is planning to murder you, Agatha Christie style, by arsenic poisoning, do what they do in her books and take a prophylactic dose. You could do it every day through the water supply.

For best results, anticipate the murder several generations in advance. According to the Smithsonian Magazine, the people of the Argentine village of San Antonio de los Cobres have been ingesting arsenic through their water supply for so long that they have developed a genetic mutation that helps them cope.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/centuries-poison-laced-water-gave-these-people-tolerance-arsenic-180954491/

 

[FrankPintor]

Don't most people in CABA already have water meters? Genuine question since all the apartment blocks I've known have had meters with the water charges being apportioned to residents on the basis of sq/m and the houses I know have individual ones facing the street. In fact it was only because of the water meter that we discovered the water leak in late F-I-L's house after he had moved out.

I'm not sure about this, our situation, with a single meter for the barrio and the consumption divided among the residents, seems to be common out here in Zona Norte. Maybe it has to do with being served by a different water company (Copesel rather than AySA), I really don't know. All I know is that there would be a lot of individual meters to install.

About your link https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smar...ave-these-people-tolerance-arsenic-180954491/ it's interesting, for sure. Any word on cancer rates, though?