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brin_bellway[fairly mild cw: poverty, illness]
(part 1)
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That 22 cubic-metres-per-two-months figure? That was from 2021. I've been organising the 2022 household bill archive, and recently I looked at the water bills and saw an abrupt, sustained drop at the beginning of 2022: we're varying in the 16 - 19 range now. (With a 14.7 outlier for the period covering the five days we couldn't use the bathroom pipes.)
I mentioned this while chatting with Mom that night, wondering what had happened.
"...oh," said Mom.
She explained: January 2022 was when she got sick (the timing suggests Long COVID, although nobody else ever showed symptoms and at the time it started she hadn't left the house in two weeks, so who knows†), and dropped from showering ~daily to showering ~weekly.
...I guess the implication is that something like 20% of our water consumption was going towards supporting a single daily-showering person. I wasn't going to bother pushing for a low-flow showerhead (ours is 2.5 gallons per minute, as opposed to the modern 1.5 - 2) after seeing that the effect of [my decon showers in 2020] on our water bill was not super distinguishable from random noise (though there was maybe an increase if you squint††), but maybe it's worth the switch after all.
---
†At the time she believed it to be "keto flu", carbohydrate withdrawal from an abrupt change in diet; by the time she realised it wasn't going away anywhere near as quickly as keto flu would, it was too late to rapid-antigen test. ↩
††And squinting at it again...if you told me there was no change I'd believe you, but OTOH if you told me there was a 10% increase in spring/summer 2020 I could also believe *that*. And I *still* wasn't showering daily, maybe 3 - 5 times/week. ↩
(part 1)
---
That 22 cubic-metres-per-two-months figure? That was from 2021. I've been organising the 2022 household bill archive, and recently I looked at the water bills and saw an abrupt, sustained drop at the beginning of 2022: we're varying in the 16 - 19 range now. (With a 14.7 outlier for the period covering the five days we couldn't use the bathroom pipes.)
I mentioned this while chatting with Mom that night, wondering what had happened.
"...oh," said Mom.
She explained: January 2022 was when she got sick (the timing suggests Long COVID, although nobody else ever showed symptoms and at the time it started she hadn't left the house in two weeks, so who knows†), and dropped from showering ~daily to showering ~weekly.
...I guess the implication is that something like 20% of our water consumption was going towards supporting a single daily-showering person. I wasn't going to bother pushing for a low-flow showerhead (ours is 2.5 gallons per minute, as opposed to the modern 1.5 - 2) after seeing that the effect of [my decon showers in 2020] on our water bill was not super distinguishable from random noise (though there was maybe an increase if you squint††), but maybe it's worth the switch after all.
---
†At the time she believed it to be "keto flu", carbohydrate withdrawal from an abrupt change in diet; by the time she realised it wasn't going away anywhere near as quickly as keto flu would, it was too late to rapid-antigen test. ↩
††And squinting at it again...if you told me there was no change I'd believe you, but OTOH if you told me there was a 10% increase in spring/summer 2020 I could also believe *that*. And I *still* wasn't showering daily, maybe 3 - 5 times/week. ↩
