For the sake of time we've been watering the gardens with a sprinkler. Well, our bill tripled this month. "Something has got to change!" The previous months ran somewhere between 450 and 550 watts, this month 1850 watts, yikes! And don't forget the add in the price we have to pay for sewer, which they base off of water consumption. Go figure.
After 30 minutes of hand pumping water up from the river in order to save a buck, we were left even more frustrated and bothered. The next step was to read the water meter to get a baseline, hand water with the hose and sprayer, check the water meter again and compare. We did this for the canning garden, the regular garden, including the new raised beds and berries. Both chunks of watering took about 2 watts each. Which altogether equates to about $20 a month.
I had many frustrations thinking......how are we supposed to be saving money by growing our own food, when it's going to cost us an extra $200 per month to water it using city water? Is that frugal? Might as well join a CSA for that price.
If we lived out in the country and had a well, then we wouldn't have to spend so much money watering. There must be a way to save money and grow good healthy food in order to rely less on stores. Any suggestions would be helpful at this point. We do live on a river, but it's very time consuming to haul buckets of water up from the river. I am waiting for the order to come in for the rain barrels, then we can do some gravity feed watering, WHEN there's rain.
2 comments:
Hi Heather have you thought about putting a small sump pump in the river and only running it when you need it. You could even tie it in with a sprinkler system and let it do all the watering. Let me know if you want more info my step dad is really helpful with things like this. See ya, Lisa
We've been looking into that. But the sump pumps I've seen need pressure from a water hose still. And we did the hand pump and it took too long. But I would like to talk to your step dad about it, we should do an evening out at the farm sometime.
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