Opening your tap makes your home basically a side arm of a river
Whenever you let water run, you make your home part of the greater water system, which eventually starts with springs and ends in an ocean. You have a tiny side arm of a river in your sink!
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The most showery thought i'seen so far
When I go and water my pumpkins part is evaporated and part is put into ground water. That groundwater then drains to a part of the local river upstream of the treatment plant and in theory a part of the water I put on my pumpkins may go right back to my house again. A peculiar water cycle for sure. One could imagine that a few water molecules may have made the trip more than once.
And yet, you have to pay for those molecules each time! What a scam...
Thankfully not actually! I live in a region with such an overabundance of water that slightly less than 0,2% of the water volume in the river is used by us humans. The rest goes straight to the ocean. I only pay a monthly fee for the maintenance of the pipes and the water plant.
Also when I pee
The water body - sources, rivers, sea, also clouds, also water in the soil, is a single being of enormous power. Imagine having a tiny hair of mother water in your home!
Tap water is rarely pumped from rivers. Most of the time it's pumped from groundwater.
True, but the tap is usually connected to a sink and wastewater systems are usually connected to a river.
Probably not, what OP was thinking, but if you think about it that way, it's even more fitting. Tiny sidearms of rivers usually flow together to form the larger river. Plus, the water in many sewers doesn't even get pumped and simply flows by gravitational force, much like a river.
Plenty of water systems have surface intakes actually. But it's certainly not going straight from the water surface to your tap.
Unless you're on the Smith River in California, then you just need a filter!
What do you think a spring is
We pull from the aquifer, which is prior to the spring!
We pull from a river with a fairly large watershed which skips the aquifer too!
The water from my tap (and my pee) gets dumped into the backyard. It then gets pumped out of my backyard back into my taps and toilet. My water cycle is a little bit shorter.
Wait your pee is pumped back into your taps?
Sort of. The septic tank drains into the ground and the well pumps it out of the ground. They're not that far apart so I imagine after a few decades some pee filtered by groundwater ends up back into the well. But I'm no expert.
Sort of an expert here: Could be decades, could be months, could be days.
It all kinda depends on geological conditions (as well as the condition of your septic tank). Groundwater flow rates can be very different. If you have sandy soil, it will be a lot quicker than if you have a lot more silt or clay.
It should be no less than 50 days though, because in that timeframe it is usually assumed, that microbial activity in the soil as well as adsorbtion can remove most of the harmful substances.
I hope whoever built that system took that into account, though.
No, when I turn on tap, the water stored in overhead tank gets dispersed out via pipes. And source of water may be from groundwater and not a river stream.