6 Years of Living in Mexico and I Finally Got the Water Schedule Figured out February 13
In most cities in Mexico the municipal water supply is intermittent. People have tanks on their roofs that gravity feed water to the faucets in the house. Some people also have a cistern under their house with an electric pump that can be used to refill the roof tank as needed. We don’t have a cistern, so must be careful not to empty our tank when there is no municipal water to refill it. When you retire in Mexico I highly recommend that you don’t try to live without a cistern.
For years I have tried to observe the water supply and only wash clothes while I have water coming to the house, but it’s tiring to have to plan around the water and frustrating when I run out despite my efforts to be vigilant.
I’ve taken to calling the water people to ask them when we will get water to our neighborhood (colonia). At first this started when I had accidentally run out of water and was desperate for more. I’ve had to call a lot in the last couple of months. Once when a rude lady answered the phone, she told me something about the water being every other day (cada tercer día), speaking to me as if I should somehow have already known about it. She was rude, so I didn’t ask her more about what she had said, but I was confused. I know that I often get water to my house on consecutive days so why did she say that it’s every other day?
On my most recent desperate call to the water department the nice man answered and told me that the water would be coming later in the day, after 1:00 p.m. I took advantage of having him on the phone and asked him about the every other day thing.
He explained that our water is every other day, but that on some days, when the people “upstream” from us don’t use all of the water on their day, it “overflows” into our part of the neighborhood. That little explanation cleared up so much confusion for me. That’s why the pressure is sometimes low (it’s on overflow days) and why sometimes the water comes really late (again, on overflow days).
I hung up the phone dazed by having such useful information. Then I decided to call him back. Why not have all the information I needed to plan laundry and other water-intensive activities? He helped me to figure out how my water supply would be over the next two weeks. Since the water comes every other day, one week it comes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and the next week it comes Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. The following week the cycle repeats. This also explains why I could never observe the pattern on my own. With this rotating schedule and the overflow water coming to confuse me, I had spent years of frustration.
I am still just astounded that I finally have this information. When you live in Mexico you have to figure out the key questions to ask people and sometimes it literally takes years for those questions to occur to you. When they finally do, it’s like the sun comes out and birds start singing.