I am currently living in my parents house, which is fed water by a private well, and we have no way of knowing exactly how much water we use. Since I’m planning on building my own house, I wanted to know how much water I (and everyone else in the house) realistically used. In addition, I wanted to know how much hot water we use and how frequently we use hot water, so I could model hot water heating systems.

I am currently living in my parents house, which is fed water by a private well. Due to the mineral content in most well water, we use a water softener. For those of you with city water, a water softener is a type of ion exchange filter which uses salt (sodium chloride) to replace calcium, magnesium, and other metals in the water with sodium. None of these minerals are hazardous, but they do stain everything, so reducing them is desirable.

While visiting my parents shortly before Thanksgiving weekend, the septic pump stopped working, resulting in a very slight ingress of fluid through the basement drain. My parents have an engineered septic system which unfortunately required the leach field to be located at a higher elevation than the septic tank behind the house. As we all know, shit flows down hill, and a pump is required to make it flow up hill.