On mornings that I turn on the shower faucet, I wait an interminable amount of time waiting for it to turn from cold to hot.
Then I go into the kitchen and wait for the faucet to do the same. I repeat this scenario with that faucet multiple times a day. Feels insane given our future prospects for water.
I watch as countless gallons of water go down the drain having served absolutely no purpose. Like taking unopened junk mail directly from the front door of my house to the recycling box at the back door.
While Utah has passed some good laws of late including monitoring secondary water usage and allowing folks to replace their lawn with drought tolerant landscaping independent of HOA requirements, our conservation efforts have not matched those of surrounding states.
What if we were to pass legislation that diverts some tax dollars toward incentivizing new home builders and existing home remodelers to install tankless water heaters close to these two major points of consumption. They provide hot water right at the point of use and on demand.
Tankless water heaters would represent real conservation.
Those tax dollars could come from diverting some of the state’s proposed tax expenditures on new water retaining and delivery infrastructure.
Wouldn’t that be a concrete effort to conserve, rather than our apparent plan of hoping and praying for a return to normal precipitation to fill expensive new planned reservoirs and pipelines? Unlike hoping and praying, employing existing technology to reduce the flow is a strategy.
Paul Zuckerman, Salt Lake City
Donate to the newsroom now. The Salt Lake Tribune, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) public charity and contributions are tax deductible