I ran into this Water Usage Calculator at BBC News. This is an easy to use, graphical interface. The questions are based on liters, however they supply "average" answers so you can fill it in even if you are a dumb American. (yep, that's me! ha.)

I was completely shocked at my results. I'm not sure I can call myself an environmentalist, any more!

"The average person in Britain uses 155 Litres a day."
"Each person [in your household] uses 238 litres per day."

GACK!

I guessed on a couple of the questions, and may have over-estimated. But I am still very disturbed:

Shower: 71%
Toilet: 15%
Running Tap: 8%
Washing Up (dishes?): 3%
Washing Machine: 3%
Dishwasher: (less than 1%)

Yeah. The shower. We tend to take long showers, here. And I take more than one shower a day, on some days. I like being clean. Occasionally, I take a shower to warm up, on cold days. Showers are kind of like my comfort food: I take them to cheer me up.

I am ashamed of myself!

But I now know what I need to work on. Maybe I need to get some kind of timer. The goal is a five minute shower!

In other things, I know we do a pretty good job about limiting our water. SO tells me he is no longer running the water when he brushes his teeth. And, even better, he has quit running water when he shaves. That's awesome, yay SO! :)

We have a low flow shower head. Aerators on the taps are standard, these days. Our downstairs toilet is a water saver, it has a much smaller tank than the upstairs, and I try to use it more often. I also practice selective flushing when I'm home alone, which is most of the time.

I've been meaning to put a "hippo" in the upstairs toilet, aka, a displacement device. Probably just a two liter coke bottle... there's plenty of room for it in there.

I just bought a watering can for my garden. I am really interested in getting my poor plants to grow this year, and we are 9.25 inches behind on rainfall. I'm going to put the can in the shower to catch the warmup water. It would be cool to get a pan to fit in our kitchen sink, too, since we do a lot of hand washing. Tho perhaps we should switch to the dish washing machine... supposedly it uses less water than handwashing.

Just need to do a better job of saving the world!

Static8 > Journal > Archive > 14 Apr 2007 Entry