At least 36 states are expected to face water shortages within the next five years, due to drought, rising demand and rising temperatures. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Americans use an average of 100 gallons of water each day. Bathroom showers, toilets, and sinks account for approximately 75% of water used in your home. Older bathroom toilets (pre 1992) use about 5 gallons of water per flush. Newer high efficiency toilets use only about 1.6 gallons per flush. Dual flush toilets use .5 gallons per flush. The average person flushes the toilet 8 times per day. According to the EPA, water treatment plants in the United States use about 56 billion kilowatt hours per year to supply and treat water. This is enough electricity to power more than 5 million homes for an entire year.
The average bathroom faucet uses two gallons of water per minute. If you turn off the water while brushing your teeth, you can save up to 8 gallons of water per day. Leaky faucets can waste more than 3000 gallons of water in a year. A leaky toilet can waste about 200 gallons of water every day. A five minute shower uses 10 to 25 gallons of water but a bath can use as much as 70 gallons of water. So if you have a leaky faucet or toilet repairing these can save you a substantial amount of money. And of course shorter showers or using restricted shower heads will result in less water used.
According to the EPA, U.S. households could save more than 3 trillion gallons of water a year and more than 18 billion dollars a year by installing water efficient appliances. The average washing machine uses 41 gallons of water per load but the newer high efficiency models use less than 28 gallons per load. A dishwasher uses 11 gallons of water per use and you use 35 gallons of water if you wash dishes by hand.
Americans use 15 gallons of water per day to water their lawn and garden and 15 gallons to wash their cars, maintain their swimming pool and hot tub, and cleaning sidewalks and driveways. Over half of the water used for the lawn and garden is wasted due to evaporation or runoff caused by overwatering. Remember water is one of our most precious resources so we all need to conserve where we can.
Not to shame anyone but the statistics show that the US wastes more resources on average than any other country. I think we need to do some re-thinking here.
Jay and Lynne
Hi Jay and Lynne, great post, thank you. I lived with a landlady once who saved every drop of water she ran out of her tap to use on the garden. She never let water go down the sink, had a bowl in the sink to catch it and a bucket beside it to pour it into. If she wanted hot water she ran the cold in the hot tap off into the bowl first until the hot came through, emptied into the bucket, then ran the hot into the bowl. Vegetables were washed and peeled in the bowl and that water went into the bucket too. She even used eco friendly washing up liquid and the washing up water went…you guessed – into the bucket. Really good post, thanks you.
Enjoy the journey.
Mandy