Groxie

I finished up the water diet on Monday, and I’m pretty pleased with what I’ve learned. The first week, my calculated residential use was 86.1 liters per day. This last week, I averaged only 39.8 liters a day. That’s a 54% reduction! Here are the figures (compared to the first week):

• 90 liters for toilet (192)
• 7.7 liters drinking water (5.6)
• 63.9 liters shower (110)
• 56.8 liters laundry (170.5)
• 4.5 liters for toothbrushing (5)
• 2.0 liters water for cooking (8)
• 47.2 liters for dishwashing (107.1)
• 6.5 liters for random stuff (4.5)

Since we rent our place, I had to decrease my usage without changing any of the hardware or appliances. While it was tedious to track every drop of water, simply using less wasn’t too bad.

Since our kitchen sink is just a big utility sink, washing dishes was the biggest problem. Using a two compartment sink or dishwasher is much less water intensive than trying to wash and rinse dishes in one compartment. To fix this problem, I grabbed a bucket to use as my washing compartment.

The toilet is already low—flow, but there are plenty of ways to make even better use of the water. Again, since it’s not really my toilet, instead of shoving in a brick or adding on a sink, I stuck with other conservation measures.

Using less water in the shower was incredibly easy thanks to the faucet fixture. The shower handle has a lever to turn the water on and a seperate dial to adjust the temperature. That means you can turn off the water while lathering up without having to readjust the temperature each time you turn it back on. I saved a ton of water this way, and my skin ended up feeling less dry, too!

Also, in the grand spirit of conservation, I only drank 24 ounces of beer (as compared to my 96 ounces the first week). Since I was sick towards the end of the week, I also had 12 ounces of juice. Add in my 24 ounces of tea, and my water footprint from beverages adds up to 622 liters. For less than 2 liters of beverages, that’s a pretty hefty price, but it is still an 81% reduction from the first week.

I saved 2974 liters with just the small measured changes I made. Imagine if everyone in the neighborhood, the city, the country conserved that same amount. We’d save 50,258 Olympic pools of water every single day in America alone.

I’ll post a neat comparison of the water footprints of common food and drink soon. In the meantime, I hope my experiment will encourage you to attempt some low-cost simple conservation measures. Seeing the numbers after I put in just a little effort really helped me understand how small changes add up.