[Greenbuilding] Jevons's plumber

[Reuben Deumling]

On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 7:13 PM, Clarke Olsen <colsen at fairpoint.net> wrote:

> I'd like top know more about "inflection points". I thought of the WWII
> period as a low point, with the rush to bring new machinery
> on line for the amazing wartime industrial expansion. I have some 19th
> century machinery which shows superb casting technique.
> I had assumed that without the follow-up machines, they cast a finished
> unit, whereas later a finish grinding was assumed.
>
> You may well be right about casting finishes being even better before the
point I've identified as an inflection point. Certainly there will be many
points, and each parameter & product pair one might choose to study will
potentially exhibit one or more that are unique to that pair. And they can
be peaks or valleys.

Studying the water consumption of US flush toilets one is struck by the
fact that in the 1920s toilets used a comparable amount of water per flush
that today's (1992) EPA standard compliant toilets use. So how to explain
the interim nuttiness that included 12 gpf in the sixties, and the more
common 8 and 5 and 3.5 gpf models?  And washing machines that used 70
gallons of water per load?!
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