Plumbing Facts
•Albert Einstein was named an honorary member of the Plumbers and Steamfitters Union after saying publicly that he would become a plumber if he had to do it all over again.
•The world’s most famous plumbers are probably video game superstars Mario and Luigi, of Nintendo’s Super Mario Brothers series.
•Copper piping, which is the #1 material used for plumbing work in today’s world, is the same material that the Egyptians used to lay their own pipe – some 3000 years ago!
•Archeologists have recovered a portion of a water plumbing system from the Pyramid of Cheops in Egypt. The evidence of indoor plumbing in palaces has dating back to 2500 B.C.E.
•Since 1963 (the year CDA was established), more than 28 billion feet or about 5.3 million miles of copper plumbing tube has been installed in U.S. buildings. That’s equivalent to a coil wrapping around the Earth more than 200 times. The current installation rate now exceeds a billion feet per year.
•In a typical home, more than 9,000 gallons of water are wasted while running the faucet waiting for hot water. As much as 15% of your annual water heating costs can be wasted heating this extra 9,000 gallons.
•Though we all have heard the many slang-words of which his cognomen is probably responsible for, the truth is… there is no hard evidence anywhere that English plumber, Thomas Crapper, was the inventor of the modern-day amenity that often bears his less-than-flattering name (it’s believed Crapper may have bought the patent rights from another man – Albert Giblin – and marketed the concept as his own).
•If a drip from your faucet fills an eight ounce glass in 15 minutes, it will waste 180 gallons per month and 2,160 gallons per year.
•A low flush toilet can save you up to 18,000 gallons of water per year.
•In the tomb of a king of the Western Han Dynasty in China (206 BC to 24 AD), archaeologists discovered a 2,000-year-old “toilet” – complete with running water, a stone seat and even a comfortable armrest! The finding: marked the earliest-known water closet, which is quite like what we are using today, in the entire world.
•The Earth has somewhere in the neighborhood of 326,000,000,000,000,000,000 gallons (326 million trillion gallons) of water on the planet. Roughly 98% of our water’s in the oceans of the world, and therefore is unusable for drinking because of the salt content. That means only around 2% of the planet’s water is fresh, but 1.6% of that water is locked up in ice caps and glaciers. Another 0.36% is found in very deep, underground sources – meaning only about 0.036% of the planet’s total water supply is found in lakes and rivers (our main supplies of drinking water)!
