I ran across the first red tag that I've seen in the City of Orange for non-adherence to the State of California mandated water restrictions. 

Watch out -- the water police are out there!

Adjust your sprinklers now if you haven't already!

I stand corrected on the City of Orange not putting the number of gallons per unit on the front of the bill -- I just received my latest bill and in the green margin (on the front of the bill) it clearly states 1 unit = 748 gallons.  My bad!

I also noticed that my water usage for the current billing period isn't quite as voracious as I thought, as it covers almost 2 months (57 days to be exact).  



So here's my stats:

• 37 units for the billing period
• 27,676 gallons total for the billing period
• 177,290 gallons annualized
• 486 gallons/day
  
• $1.52/day
  
• Approximately 1/3 of 1 cent per gallon (makes bottled water look pretty astronomical!)
  

At least I'm well shy of the 750,000 - 1M gallons/year that some of the elected officials noted in the recent OC Register article (click to view) are using.  As I've adjusted my sprinklers per the new State of California guidelines, it will be interesting to see the impact on my next billing cycle (dead lawn aside, ha ha!).  Let's hope the elected officials adjust their sprinklers as well!

While driving in the middle of a pounding rainstorm this afternoon, I pulled over to park and check my emails.  There just happened to be a message from the City of Orange indicating that there was now mandatory water cutbacks in effect.  The ironic part (other than the pouring rain outside of my window) was that the City had also sent another message, an hour prior, offering sandbags (and sand) should I have any flooding issues!


In any event, it appears that we'll all be forced to restrict watering our lawns from April-October to twice per week, no more than 10 minutes per station, and not during the day (between 9AM-5PM).  In the winter months, only once/week.  Also, no watering your lawn within 48 hours of a measureable rainfall -- which makes sense.  I have a friend who is very good about reminding people, via FaceBook, to turn their sprinklers off each time it rains -- I think it's a great idea (and now it's the law!).

If you don't have a sprinkler timer with a rain delay feature, I would highly recommend purchasing one.  A few years ago I replaced my timer with a much more user friendly model (click on photo attached to this article).  I liked it so much I purchased one for a rental property of mine as well -- easier for the tenants to "drive" and I would know how to use it too if they ever had questions!  It is much more intuitive than my old unit.  The current unit allows you to delay the sprinklers coming back on for up to 72 hours -- it will come in handy during our current drought season.  And if I notice that my neighbor's lawns are a lot greener than mine in the upcoming months, I'm going to be very suspicious, ha ha!