• LogicalDrivel@sopuli.xyz
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    1 day ago

    I was an irrigation tech at a 27 hole golf course a while back. We had the reclaim system you’re talking about and a retention lake that we would pull from. During the winter (Florida) it was pretty close to a stable system. There wasn’t much loss to evaporation and our lake didn’t need to be refilled. During the summer and especially in droughts, more than half our water was city water supplementing our lake. We would pump about 1 million gallons of water per night normally. In the summer and drought seasons it could be closer to 2 million per night and half of that was city water. We were a smaller course too, some of the PGA 36 hole courses could easily double those numbers. Golf courses are a blight on the land and a giant waste of all kinds of resources.

    • Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      27 hole is not small. The majority of courses out there are 9 or 18. And the recycled water I was talking about came from outside the course. Usually part of the waste water system in the area. That’s probably less common in Florida though. I am amzed you could be stable in the winter. I didn’t know reclimation could be that effective.

      • LogicalDrivel@sopuli.xyz
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        1 day ago

        My mistake, I hadn’t considered the recycled water would be supplied by the city like that. Where I was it was mostly retention ponds like I mentioned. As for being stable in winter, that really depended on rain. If we got a decent rain a few times a month it would mostly even out, but even then we still needed topping off from time to time.

        • Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          Yeah, even though they can treat sewage enough to make it safe to drink, most people don’t want to anyway. So they often send it to golf courses, water features, sometimes very large companies will use it if they have a lot of grass on thier campuses. It’s just a matter of piping it most of the time because they can’t just release the sewage untreated, so it’s there for the taking. But piping isn’t cheap if it is an urban area.