29th Oct 2007
How much water do you use?
This is the second in a series of posts on resource use.
It’s my belief that most people just don’t understand the water cycle and this is to blame for just about most of our problems with water policy and practice (that and outright greed) in the United States. And I say this as someone who majored in earth science in college, who has edited a considerable number of hydrology chapters on groundwater and surface water for textbooks, and someone who has been on the local water board. I think about water a lot. I’ve talked to people about their water quite a bit. And I think that many people don’t get where water comes from. They don’t get how scarce it is. And they don’t get that we are going to run out.
Take a good look at this diagram from the USGS. Where is most of the water? It looks like most of it is stored in groundwater or freshwater or the atmosphere. However, most of the water in the water cycle is stored in the oceans as salt water. How much? Like more than 97%.* (The diagram is misleading in hopes of being illustrative.) And then just about 2% (or less as they are melting) is stored as glaciers. That leaves 1% divided between groundwater, surface water, and soil moisture. That’s 1% of the water that’s available for our use.
Why do I care? I basically came of age in a drought, so my habits are naturally thrifty with water. As a teenager in Santa Barbara/Goleta, I took 3 minute showers with our low-flow shower head, turned off the water while soaping and shaving, let the lawn die and planted cacti, and just about never washed the cars. We only did full loads with the dishwasher and laundry and we never let water run down the drain if it could be repurposed. Unfortunately, to “alleviate” the drought, Santa Barbara voted to import “state water,” which is really water stolen…um…removed from other places.
Our current home is rather unique in California in that we actually use community well water. Several years, all of a sudden, the wells couldn’t provide enough water for the community and we had to truck water in. Trucking in water for a few months was expensive, we had to raise the water rates, and everyone had to learn to conserve.
Conservation is a really good idea, but domestic water from wells and public water supply is only about 10-12% of the water used in the United States. What uses the rest? Check out the scary bar graph from the USGS, which indicates that as of 2000 roughly half of all water in the United States was used in thermoelectric plants. See the connection to yesterday’s post on electricity use? Use less electricity and you actually use less water.
So how do you know how much water you use at home (or at work for that matter)? It should be recorded in cubic feet or gallons on your bill. You could also just read your meter, though most meters are the property of the water service provider so you don’t want to tamper with it. You can play around with this calculator from the USGS to get an estimate of how much water you might use. And check out the resources from your local water company. Many offer a free “water audit” in which someone will come to your home and give you suggestions for how to conserve.
Resources
Save Water in 49 Ways
Water Saving Tips by Region
Water Saver Home Tour
Everyday Water Saving Tips from Consumer Reports
*According to F.W. Fetter’s Applied Hydrogeology
Excellent, helpful post, Steph. Thank you!! I think about water a lot (as one whose family ran out of it when I was a teenager–numerous wells run dry, poor water pressure). I have a phobia of running out of water (hydro-less-phobia!) and listening to the state of the state of Georgia makes me nervous. We have our own well here and we live in a water-logged (now anyway) area, but I am still aware of the potential of the well running dry. We do not water our lawn (we did when we seeded part of it, but that’s it) and we don’t take long showers and we run the dishwasher when it is full. Still, I think we could do more. I’m going to try harder. Thanks for the reminder.
Well, the good thing about living in a swamp is that you can keep tabs on the water table.
In your area, I would be most concerned about any new development that plans to drill wells that serve large groups of people.
Most everyone else on our street is on town water (about 15 years ago there was a little issue of people’s wells becoming polluted from the salt pile at the highway department–which is uphill from here–they’ve since moved the salt pile. We got our water tested again last year and it’s fine). I’ll keep my eye out though.
I wish there was a “Kill-a-Drop” gizmo for water usage, but the nature of plumbing makes that tricky I guess. Our water usage at our current house is much higher than at our previous house, and I’m not sure why. The master toilet is an older high-flush model, could that really make such a big difference? (I’ve put a bottle of water in the tank to take up some of the space and make it use a little bit less…) Is a toilet running a little bit somewhere and we just don’t hear it? Is the washing machine here wildly less efficient than the old one? So hard to figure out.
Oh, and I meant to add - the point about electric plants using up water was brought up recently in the newspaper in a story about drought. Domestic water usage is the majority of what’s used around here, but the majority of that does go back into the river after it has been treated. Much of the water used for cooling the electric plants is evaporated.
Anne, does your water company do a free water audit? Because if you can get someone to open your meter, you can check for leaks in your house by seeing if the meter is turning when you don’t have any intended water use inside.