The Water Hogs of the Hamptons, 2025

The average home in Suffolk County uses about 150,000 gallons of water in a year, according to the Suffolk County Water Authority — flushing toilets, taking long showers, doing dishes and watering lawns.

On the South Fork, where the “average home” is becoming rarer by the year, hundreds of private residences use 10 times that much. Several dozen residential properties use 20 times that much, four properties use 50 times that much and one, the single biggest user of water on the South Fork over the past 12 months, consumed more than 100 times as much water as the average Suffolk homeowner did.

The eight-bedroom, nine-bathroom, 11,000-square-foot oceanfront mansion at 1710 Meadow Lane in Southampton Village used more than 15.8 million gallons of water last year. The home has been one of the region’s largest users of water every year since The Express News Group started publishing its “Water Hogs of the Hamptons” list.

The property, which is owned by a limited liability company that conceals who the true homeowner is, out sucked the next biggest consumer, the mansion at 7 Fairfield Pond Lane in Sagaponack, that was last year’s biggest user of water.

The data for this year’s list was obtained from the Suffolk County Water Authority through a Freedom of Information request by The Express News Group that asked specifically for residential properties that drew the largest volumes of water from SCWA mains between August 1, 2024, and July 31, 2025, in both Southampton and East Hampton towns.

Water use — or overuse — by homeowners across the county has both economic and personal safety implications. The Suffolk County Water Authority provides water to about 85 percent of Suffolk County residents and most of the county’s fire hydrants.

The SCWA pumps more than 70 billion gallons of water to its customers a year, about 85 percent of that to residential properties and some 70 percent of that amount is pulled from the county well fields just during the summer months — the main driver: lawn irrigation.

Local water supplies are robust and not in threat from overuse like in many parts of the United States, where some regions are seeing land subsidence because subterranean water tables are being depleted.

But when water use overtaxes the SCWA’s storage system, which is the foundation of the water pressure to supply mains, it can threaten the ability of firefighters to tap hydrants in the event of a fire. For much of August the SCWA has been in a “Stage 1 Water Alert” because its storage tanks have reached dangerously low levels in the early morning hours when thousands of sprinkler systems are running to nourish lawns — but threatening the ability of the county’s mains to deliver sufficient pressure to fire hydrants.

And when the authority has to install new wells or build more of the 100-foot-diameter storage tanks, which cost millions of dollars to construct, because one area is overtaxing its supply infrastructure, all of the SCWA’s customers must foot the bill.

The SCWA uses a variety of strategies, from simple common sense appeals to financial incentives, to convince customers to use water more wisely, and considerately, so that the delivery systems are not overwhelmed by demand. And the agency says that it sees those efforts paying dividends in small ways.

But among the “super users” — as the authority’s staff have dubbed properties that draw in more than 2 million gallons a year — many of the appeals often fall on the deaf ears of secretaries, bookkeepers and property managers who only know that the boss is heading to the Hamptons for the weekend and expects the lawn to be lush.

As has been typical, Southampton Town’s estate sections in Southampton Village and Sagaponack are home to most of the biggest users of SCWA water.

All of the top 20 biggest water users in Southampton Town sucked in more than 3.7 million gallons of water from the county mains.

In East Hampton, the largest users were a Tyson Lane home and a Beach Plum Court home, both of which have been East Hampton’s top water users for several years. Both used more than 6 million gallons of water in the last 12 months.

For many of the South Fork’s super users, irrigation of expansive lawns and landscaping account for the bulk of the heavy water usage. But for those at the highest tier, properties that dwarf even their neighboring estates’ water consumption, the factors driving their giant water demand is typically location and a so-called “open loop” geothermal heating and cooling system.

Geothermal systems use the naturally stable temperature of water below ground to either cool or heat a home by running water through a series of pipes and coils to either bring the temperature in the house down in summer or raise it in winter. The systems are energy efficient, carbon neutral and highly recommended by many environmental advocates and, in some instances, even encouraged in municipal zoning guidelines.

Some geothermal systems are known as “closed loop,” meaning that they use the same water over and over again in a closed network of pipes. Closed loop systems are becoming more common but require much more underground area for their pipes because the water needs to be circulated underground for longer to moderate the temperature.

Somewhat more common is an open loop system, which simply pulls in water, runs it through the energy exchange system and then releases it back into the ground. They are also a very efficient way to heat and cool a very large house.

But for a water-supply utility like the SCWA, an open loop system connected to its supply mains can be a gargantuan burden that puts undue amount of stress on supply networks, any expansion of which comes with the costs spread to all of the authority’s customers.

“We’ve seen systems that use millions of gallons of water per year, and a few of these homes together can take up the entire capacity of one of our wells … which is a problem,” said Daniel Dubois, the SCWA’s director of communications and external affairs. “So we banned the use of our wells for these systems in 2020. We’ve reached out to customers we suspect are using these open loop systems and said you either need to drill your own well or get off our system. But our capacity to enforce that is limited.”

As a solution, the water authority has urged property owners with open loop geothermal systems to install a dedicated well to pull the water directly from the ground. Doing so does not deplete water supply itself since every gallon taken in is put back into the groundwater.

“If you’re connected to a private well, not on the public water system, as far as we’re concerned we have no issue with that,” Dubois said. “You’re taking water from right below your feet in the aquifer, using it and putting it back. It’s net zero.”

But in coastal neighborhoods, sucking in large amounts of water from a well that taps a relatively shallow water table can be problematic because it can lead to saltwater intrusion, which will quickly corrode the well equipment and cause it to fail much quicker than a normal groundwater well.

“They’re running their wells very hard and start to suck some saltwater in — that gums up the well, it fails and they call a well driller who says that they can put in a new one but in a couple years you’re going to have the same problem. So they say why don’t you just hook up to public water.”

Indeed, all of the biggest users of SCWA water are on properties that front on the ocean or bay.

The appeals by the SCWA may be making small dents in the super user ranks. Some properties that were once perennial denizens of the top-20 largest users ranks have dropped off entirely in the last two years, and others that remain have reduced their total consumption by millions of gallons, Dubois said — surmising that even those still running open loop geothermal systems off county mains may have sunk dedicated private wells to run the irrigation systems.

The problem with super users and saltwater may be a hard one to ultimately solve in the short term. The SCWA focuses most of its appeals for water conservation on more regular Joes.

The main appeals still focus on getting people to change their lawn watering habits. The company asks that property owners set their automatic sprinkler systems to run either on odd or even days, correlating to their street address. Dubois says that the odd-even system is important because even as there have been more and more customers shifting away from daily watering to only watering three days a week, the demand spikes have continued to be an issue when too many homeowners choose to water on the same days.

“Monday, Wednesday and Friday we see spikes in usage — because everyone waters on Monday, Wednesday and Friday,” Dubois said. “So use the odd-even system instead, please.”