I had a lot (for me) of visits to my site yesterday but not many comments – if you visit and would like to add or question, please do. I think a number of visitors were interested in rainwater harvesting and this is one of my passions.
I read a review in the FT (Financial Times) for Wednesday August 31 titled “Water is the new weapon in Beijing’s armoury”. Apparently China is the source of cross-border river flows to the largest number of countries in the world, including Russia and India, and is rapidly building mega-dams to control this water. The Amazon description of this new book by Brahma Chellaney says: “The battles of yesterday were fought over land. Those of today are over energy. But the battles of tomorrow may be over water.”
Our local paper (the AJC) reports this morning that most of Georgia south of the mountains is now in “extreme drought”. This may change, and hopefully it will change for Texas too (otherwise our food prices will continue to escalate) but who can tell the future. So I conserve whenever I can.
All the houses around my property use well water. The precariousness of this supply was brought home to me in 2009 when my next door neighbor’s well ran dry. They told me their well was 600 ft deep so all the more surprising it should fail and all the more concern for me since my well is less than 600 ft. I took some ‘photos of the equipment for drilling their new well.
Their new well was drilled a couple of hundred feet distance from their old well. The new well was also 600 ft which, at a cost of $10 for each foot, came to $6,000. There was insufficient water at the bottom so plus $3,000 was incurred to hydraulic fracture the bottom of the well, then an additional plus $3,000 for the pump, wiring and piping.
Interestingly, the drillers used rolls of poly pipe. Another driller told me that if the well is more than 300ft you have to use rigid 20ft pipe lengths (threaded pvc drop pipe) since the poly pipe stretches each time it is removed. It costs much more to replace a well pump if you have rigid pvc pipes since each has to be lifted out of the well and uncoupled, whilst with poly pipe you thread the pipe over a pulley, attach it to a pickup and drive down the road a couple of hundred yards and the pipe, cable and pump are quickly pulled to the surface.
I digress, the point is that the new well cost my neighbors in excess of $11,000. For this reason as well, I use my well water sparingly and try squeeze every drop I can out of my rainwater harvesting system.
I did a post a while ago about how much traffic I get and where it comes from:
http://bifurcatedcarrots.eu/2011/04/site-statistics/
It’s down a little bit from what I said there now, because summer is slower with blogs and I haven’t been writing as much.
The really strange thing is with all these visitors, I can sometimes go weeks without any comments. If I look on other blogs I often see several, sometimes even tens of comments per day, but for me a busy day is two comments.
It used to really irritate me, and it always seemed like I was doing something wrong. At some point I just accepted the fact that some blogs and bloggers by their nature have more comments than others. Just because you don’t get any comments, doesn’t mean you don’t have a good blog or a lot of readers!
In the past I’ve even seen some blogger fake their discussions, or get groups of friends to start up conversations on their blogs, so it seems like they have a more popular blog. While I don’t think many bloggers do this any more, you might run into this sometimes too.
Your site statistics and commentary are really interesting – so many countries. I appreciate your counsel and, for the time being, I am enjoying the discipline of marshaling my thoughts to paper or rather bytes. Perhaps my boys will read this – someday.