Daily Water Usage
Water is a hot topic these days. From climate change to life on Mars, everyone everywhere is concerned with water. At this point we’ve all heard the phrase “water is a precious resource” and “we need to conserve water”, but what does that mean? How much water are we even using? We thought we’d start with taking a look at just how much water one person actually uses in a typical day.
How Do We Use Water?
There are a lot of ways we use water such as watering the lawn, washing the car, awesome slip-n-slides, etc., but we’ll be taking a look at the following six common activities.
1) Washing your hands
2) Brushing your teeth
3) Going to the bathroom
4) Showering
5) Washing dishes
6) Doing laundry
Washing the dishes and doing laundry may not be daily activities in most households, but they do use a significant amount of water and everyone has to do them sometime (even that one roommate you had in college who you never actually saw do chores) so we decided to include them on the list.
1) Washing Your Hands
According to the CDC you should wash your hands for 20 seconds each wash. With a standard faucet at 2.2 GPM we come to 0.73 gallons per wash.
The CDC also lists ten scenarios after which you should always wash your hands. Assuming you eat three meals per day and use the bathroom around four times per day that’s a minimum of seven hand washings. We’ll add in an extra washing for miscellaneous coughing, sneezing, or handshaking (hopefully not all at once) to bring us to 5.84 gal per day
We’re using 5.84 gallons of water each day just to wash our hands. That’s around four times the amount of blood in the human body!
2) Brushing Your Teeth
Running the water while brushing your teeth was one of the first daily rituals to come under fire for its wastefulness. While many of us have adopted the habit of shutting the water off, if we didn’t we’d be using 8.8 gallons per day (2.2 GPM x 2 min x 2 brushings/day). That’s the same volume as roughly 55 large coffees from Starbucks.
3) Going to the Bathroom
It turns out toilets are incredibly wasteful. Not only do they use fresh, clean water to do a job where it is then immediately contaminated and thrown away, they also use a lot of it. Standard toilets use 3.5 gallons per flush which when combined with a minimum of four bathroom trips per day comes out to 14 gallons of water straight down the drain. The last few decades have seen the rise of ultra low flow toilets which use 1.6 gallons per flush for a daily total of 6.4 gallons or the equivalent of 3.5 fully inflated basketballs.
4) Showering
Showering is perhaps the least negotiable daily routine for many people. As the most personal and indulgent of activities on the list, many people are hesitant to give up their standard showers for low flow showers despite the fact that standard showers use a full 2.5 GPM. Less water has somehow become equated with a worse shower experience (Shameless plug: we think we’ve solved that at nebia), but 2.5 GPM with an average shower length of 8.2 minutes is not a drop in the bucket, so to speak. One daily shower consumes 20.5 gallons of water. That’s one and one third beer kegs of water each time you shower.
5) Washing Dishes
There are two camps in the world of dish washing: hand washers and machine washers. Determining how much water hand washing a load of dishes uses was a bit tricky since everyone claims to have a special protocol for washing dishes the fastest with the least water consumed, but in general it seems to take around 15minutes to wash dishes. Assuming a conservative 5 minutes of that time is spent with the tap on that yields 11 gallons per load of dishes.
Machine washing is much more straightforward with older machines using 10–15 gallons per load (hand washers rejoice). But as with toilets and showers, newer dishwashers have managed to reduce water usage and use 5.5 gallons per load (sorry hand washers). So the next time your mother-in-law tries to show you up with her secret hand washing technique, you can tell her she’s wasting not only your time, but also your water.
6) Doing Laundry
On to everyone’s least favorite chore: laundry. While personal laundry folding robots are still a few years out, we can at least be thankful that the washboard and tub were done away with some years ago. Unfortunately, older washing machine models didn’t seem to be designed for conservation and used 40–45 gallons per load. Since then, a focus on reducing water usage has brought newer machines down to 14–25 gallons per load (depending on the size of the machine). But even 14 gallons is a lot of water, roughly one third of a bathtub for each load of laundry.
At Nebia we’re passionate about conserving water and as you can see human water consumption is no joke. Understanding how much water we’re using is just the first step towards conserving water, but hopefully it’ll at least give you something to think about the next time you’re loading the dish washer or taking a shower.
