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Comment by tenebrisalietum | Hacker News Reader

> Water is the cheapest material that people have access to.

You don't live in the American South. I actually suspect you live near one of the Great Lakes where the water is dirt cheap. My water bill is higher than my Internet bill.

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Something I have wondered a couple times when this comes up: When people say "Water bill", do they mean solely water, or water + sewer?

Where I live, the two are bundled, and the total bill is also higher than our internet bill. (~$100 for water vs $75 for internet)

I live in Iowa, which doesn't have Great Lakes levels of water lying around, but we also have no shortage of the stuff.

Yes, they're often combined, on the basis that it's easier to measure water usage than sewer usage and the latter is presumed to be proportional to the former.

So when people say "my water bill is higher than $X", do they mean the combined bill? Does the town I live in just have abnormally high water prices for an area without water scarcity, or is water just artificially cheap in other places?

Regarding the former - Yes. It's basically something like this:

line 1 - Water usage = X line 2 - Sewage usage = X * modifier

My monthly water usage is usually something like $20 worth, but my "water bill" is usually around $60-$65 when combining water + sewage (2 adults, $ = USD).

Some people (those who own wells) don't have real "water bills" at all and are actually referring to a portion of their electric bill corresponding to the well pump usage when they say "water bill". (Depending on well depth and usage patterns, this may or may not be a significant portion of the power bill.)

We had a well growing up, and I think we always just considered the water free. Though we did have a water softener, so I suppose there was the cost of salt for that. Similar to water heating though, I think we didn't really factor that into the cost of the water.

The depth of the well is a huge factor, generally the deeper the well the harder it is to pump water out of it. There is also the matter of how fast the well will replentish. Shallow wells into unconfined aquifers in regions with plenty of rainfall are probably the best sort of wells. Those sort of wells get replenished every year (climate permitting.) On the other hand with fossil aquifers you're draining a finite amount of water that won't replenish in human timescales, if at all.

So in some regions pulling water from wells will be perfectly sustainable and essentially free, while in others it's unsustainable and expensive.

Works great until the farmer next door sucks your shallow well dry with his new irrigation system.

As I've been saying, the matter of fresh water is very local. You may or may not be near such a farmer, and such a farmer may or may not be capable of pumping that much fresh water out of the ground in the first place. In some places that's a real problem while in others it isn't.

I don’t mean this judgmentally, but how much water do you use? The bulk of residential water use tends to be for landscaping, in particular watering lawns. When my city raised rates for excess water usage, all of the homeowners complained, even though they require vastly more water infrastructure and end up using a lot more water for their lawns.

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