I think the powers that be need their heads knocking together if they think that a ban on window cleaners producing water for their WFP needs is going to make a whit of difference to water conservation.
In any one town there may be 15 or 20 window cleaners (I'm talking your average size town, not a city)
Currently, if that number were 20, less than half of them will be WFP.
So lets say there are 8 window cleaners in a town of some 10,000 people who use WFP for their work.
Reading through various posts I would say that most do not use more than 350l of water a day, which equates to a 1000l of domestic water per day.
8 window cleaners = 8000l per day
You think that sounds like a lot of water?
It's a drop in the ocean (pun intended)
If just one of the people in that town of 10.000 (say 5,000 households you reckon?) puts the sprinkler on their lawn for just 3 or 4 hours they are going to go through well over a 1000l per hour of water.
I can fill up my 1000l IBC tank in way less than an hour when I empty it to flush and clean it (did it last year, algae growth)
If just one of those 10,000 people use a hosepipe to wash their car, and they spend a quarter of an hour doing it, they will use several hundred litres of water to do so.
These are the kind of area's that make a real difference where hosepipe bans are concerned.
At any one time, in your average town there are going to be a great many people using their hosepipes to water their lawn and garden, some will even leave their sprinkler on overnight!
And cars are always being washed.
Many tens of thousands of litres of water are squandered day in and day out totaly unnecessarily in this way every summer.
The towns window cleaners using at most a 1000l of water to go about their daily business is making little difference at all.
Andwe haven't even touched on the colossal water usage of large industry, a soft drink factory or a brewery will use millions of litres every day of the week.
I'll warrent their are savings they could make that could dwarf the piddling amount a WFP user uses.
And by that I mean simply making more efficient use of the water they actually use now.
Water supply is and has always been so plentiful, and so far as industry is concerned, very cheap too, they have had no real reason to develop real efficiency.
And then of course there are the leaks......
Year on year now summer rainfall is decreasing, population and demands for water are increasing, yet still the authorities don't turn greater resources to rectify an absolutely appalling wastage, over a quarter of our water is lost before it even gets to us, it's just staggering I think, and each year that passes it is going to get worse not better.
We need to harvest our rainfall far more effectively, and a major effort needs to be made to replace all the old pipes, and not just by trying to force the water companies to do so, they are a business and have responsibilities to both shareholders and customers and they cannot do this work without massive help from central government, which of course won't be forthcoming will it
And if the water companies made the effort say...to get the leaks and pipes replaced within the next 15 or 20 years we would all be hit with astronamical bills and we'd all be moaning at the enormous upheaval we'd all have to face with many thousands of miles of roads and countryside being dug over....
A major worry isn't it?
So in the meantime we'll save the earth by stopping the half dozen window cleaners in an average town from using WFP...
Ian