In line with the current word-of-mouth watering restraints, I’m led to believe that watering can only occur on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and is limited to 15 minutes per watering station. Also, that watering can only be done either before 9 a.m. or after 5 p.m.

Okay, let’s do the math with my personal installation of 12 stations.

Twelve stations multiplied by 15 minutes is a total of 180 minutes, times three days a week is 540 minutes of watering per week under the proposed wordofmouth restraints. This is the “given” and considered the standard?

My personal system, all 12 stations, operate six days per week; however, every one of my stations runs for only five minutes, and many even less than five minutes.

For purposes of a quick comparison, let’s assume all stations run at five minutes each.

So now we do the math again: 12 stations times five minutes equals 60 minutes times six days per week equals 360 minutes of actual water usage per week.

Any fool—even the person who wrote the challenge in the Acorn (Aug. 28, letters, “Fines are needed to combat water wasters”)—can see that my method consumes less water than the word-of-mouth proposal.

I have to admit that this math scenario was omitted from the original Acorn article even though the math was carefully explained to the recording reporter from Acorn .

Perhaps if this additional information was published with the original article, morons with quick pencils might not have jumped to creating manifestos that recommend reprisals when, in fact, praise should have been the ruling factor. Larry Lukunich Simi Valley Lukunich was interviewed for an Aug. 21 Acorn story about the city’s new water mandate.