Friday, October 24, 2008
Island Water Etiquette
There is an old island saying “You can tell how long people have on the island by the color of their lawn in August”. While this still is usually true, the wave of retirees is beginning to change the island. We are getting more and more retirees who are still locked into the urban-suburban continuum. It never makes sense to me that people would move to Gabriola to get away from the suburban Lifestyles and then immediately try and make over the natural beauty of the island into duplicates of the suburbs. I am referring specifically to those who simply must have green lawns all summer and lots of flowers and shrubs, etc that require intensive water usage.
There are a few places on the island that have sufficient water (at present) that may be able to support extensive sprinkler systems but the vast majority of the island does not. When these people buy their houses they either don’t think about how their water usage will affect their neighbours or they simply don’t care. The fact is if you are using a wasteful sprinkler system to keep you lawn green then you are and will affect your neighbours wells and the entire local water table. Sprinklers lose 50% 0f the water to evaporation. If you are on a steep slope you can add another 20 to 30 % wastage by run off – that means for every 1,00 gallons of water used only 200 gallons actually gets to your plants and grass roots. That is an incredible wastage of water on an island where wells often dry up during the July to September dry season.
I never experienced water problems as our house is on a hill with a large catchment area above: until last summer. During the eight days I made it home last august and September my well ran dry every single night for approximately 2 hours. I started to check out why this would occur and during my search discovered other neighbours were having water problems about the same time of day and others reported that their water levels had never been this low. The only common explanation any of us could come up with is that one of our neighbours had put in a Bart Simpson yard complete with a heavy duty sprinkler system and from what we can tell no cistern system at all. Perhaps there is another explanation, so a number of us will be watching for the same conditions this dry season.
Now, if it does turn out to be our neighbours sprinkling system there are some easy fixes. The easiest and cheapest is to install at least a thousand gallon cistern system, which you could fill very slowly over a 24-48 hr period and run your sprinklers off the cistern. This method doesn’t cause a sudden fall in anyone’s well as the water is replaced during the day. This is a good short-term solution but doesn’t affect the amount of water wasted by the system.
Now our neighbor isn’t the one I blame for this water wastage - I blame the people who took his money (a lot of it I hear) and where either to new to the island to understand the water problems or they simply didn’t care. Either way my neighbor and by extension all of his neighbors got ripped off. A person pays out a lot of money to people who claim to be qualified landscapers and then rip him off by installing the cheapest and most wasteful irrigation system. If they really knew what they were doing they would have installed the underground drip system – sometimes called the spaghetti hoses. This system is 95% efficient in delivering just the right amount of water for grass and all kinds of plants. In other words he would only have to use 210 gallons of water to get the same effect as he now does with sprinklers using a 1,000 gallons. The other good thing about this slow drip system is that it operates all day instead of siphoning off water faster than it can be replaced.
Long tem though this system is unlikely to be effective as more and more people buy houses up hill from him and install their own sprinklers: because if enough of the do it then there won’t be any water reaching my neighbour. Long-term 10 to 20 years down the road the problem will be almost impossible to fix without the wholesale banning of sprinkler systems.
The people who can’t make the transition from suburban to island life usually leave, unfortunately we seem to be getting more of the people who can’t change their mind set and instead just believe they can do whatever they want and to hell with their neighbours. These people frozen into middle class suburban mindsets believe that their class suburban yards are impressing people! They don’t realize instead most of the people who aren’t actively angry with them are laughing at them. If Islanders were impressed with the suburbs they would have moved there.
Ian has a Masters degree in counseling and 30 odd years of practice and teaching psychology and counseling. He has just re-opened his Gabriola Counseling Service.
There are a few places on the island that have sufficient water (at present) that may be able to support extensive sprinkler systems but the vast majority of the island does not. When these people buy their houses they either don’t think about how their water usage will affect their neighbours or they simply don’t care. The fact is if you are using a wasteful sprinkler system to keep you lawn green then you are and will affect your neighbours wells and the entire local water table. Sprinklers lose 50% 0f the water to evaporation. If you are on a steep slope you can add another 20 to 30 % wastage by run off – that means for every 1,00 gallons of water used only 200 gallons actually gets to your plants and grass roots. That is an incredible wastage of water on an island where wells often dry up during the July to September dry season.
I never experienced water problems as our house is on a hill with a large catchment area above: until last summer. During the eight days I made it home last august and September my well ran dry every single night for approximately 2 hours. I started to check out why this would occur and during my search discovered other neighbours were having water problems about the same time of day and others reported that their water levels had never been this low. The only common explanation any of us could come up with is that one of our neighbours had put in a Bart Simpson yard complete with a heavy duty sprinkler system and from what we can tell no cistern system at all. Perhaps there is another explanation, so a number of us will be watching for the same conditions this dry season.
Now, if it does turn out to be our neighbours sprinkling system there are some easy fixes. The easiest and cheapest is to install at least a thousand gallon cistern system, which you could fill very slowly over a 24-48 hr period and run your sprinklers off the cistern. This method doesn’t cause a sudden fall in anyone’s well as the water is replaced during the day. This is a good short-term solution but doesn’t affect the amount of water wasted by the system.
Now our neighbor isn’t the one I blame for this water wastage - I blame the people who took his money (a lot of it I hear) and where either to new to the island to understand the water problems or they simply didn’t care. Either way my neighbor and by extension all of his neighbors got ripped off. A person pays out a lot of money to people who claim to be qualified landscapers and then rip him off by installing the cheapest and most wasteful irrigation system. If they really knew what they were doing they would have installed the underground drip system – sometimes called the spaghetti hoses. This system is 95% efficient in delivering just the right amount of water for grass and all kinds of plants. In other words he would only have to use 210 gallons of water to get the same effect as he now does with sprinklers using a 1,000 gallons. The other good thing about this slow drip system is that it operates all day instead of siphoning off water faster than it can be replaced.
Long tem though this system is unlikely to be effective as more and more people buy houses up hill from him and install their own sprinklers: because if enough of the do it then there won’t be any water reaching my neighbour. Long-term 10 to 20 years down the road the problem will be almost impossible to fix without the wholesale banning of sprinkler systems.
The people who can’t make the transition from suburban to island life usually leave, unfortunately we seem to be getting more of the people who can’t change their mind set and instead just believe they can do whatever they want and to hell with their neighbours. These people frozen into middle class suburban mindsets believe that their class suburban yards are impressing people! They don’t realize instead most of the people who aren’t actively angry with them are laughing at them. If Islanders were impressed with the suburbs they would have moved there.
Ian has a Masters degree in counseling and 30 odd years of practice and teaching psychology and counseling. He has just re-opened his Gabriola Counseling Service.
