I ran a story yesterday about Celine Dion using so many million gallons of water per year, and one of my YouTube viewers asked me how many gallons I use a year. This intrigued me. What if I use millions of gallons, can I make fun of Celine for doing the same?!
So I started calculating using a few things I found here and there online to see if I could come up with a rough estimate. A ten minute shower uses 35 gallons of water. I shower pretty quickly and I figured up I probably use around 5,000 gallons of water a year to shower. Then I decided to just add another 5,000 for hand washing, teeth brushing, and other random faucet running throughout the year. If you have a pretty normal toilet, It uses about 5 gallons a flush. I have no idea how many times I go to the bathroom a day so I just said 5. That seemed like a nice round about number. That equals about 10,000 gallons of water just to flush! It's where people use the most water every day.
I only do laundry about once a month, because I have a ton of clothes and don't have to wash that often. The average load of laundry uses about 55 gallons of water, so I went ahead and said I probably do the laundry 15 times a year, once a month and then three extra times for the rare instance that something I want to wear isn't clean or I've run out of socks for the gym. That's 715 gallons a year, which isn't half bad. That's why you're supposed to wait and do a full load all at once!! Which now that I think of it, I guess I always do a white and a color load so double that. It's still just over 1,000.
In the kitchen, I don't use as much water as I'd thought. Dishwashers are actually pretty earth friendly already, they only use 5-8 gallons a wash, which is much less than you'd use doing them by hand. I do my dishes about once a week so that equals 520 gallons a year. I say, round that up to 600 to accommodate any rinsing and hand washing. I also drink a lot of water. I figured up what I should be drinking, and just calculated that. It's always going to be more or less on any given day, but with the amount of lemonade and tea I drink (which I make with water) this is probably pretty accurate. At 64 ounces a day, that's 23,360 ounces per year - or 182.5 gallons. That is a lot of water intake. No wonder that's where all our weight comes from.
All of that together equals 22,212 (point 5. and don't check my math on that). I say, go ahead and round it up to 25,000 because there's plenty of other stuff we use water for that we don't even remember, like boiling and cooking and cleaning. According to google search, the average person uses 80-100 gallons per day, which translates to roughly 30,000 gallons a year. If I'm using 5,000 gallons LESS than the average person, that's pretty good!
But the entire experience did make me think a little bit more about where I waste water. I'm pretty good about not letting it run, but seeing how much certain things in my house used kind of helped me think of ways to cut back on my usage. Love your earth! Think about what you use!!
