How We Reduced Our Water Usage by 90%
Spoiler alert: it was mostly an accident.
See, the other day I was half way through writing a lovely little post about how we fertilize our garden for free when my fingers chanced to alight upon our water bill, freshly arrived in the mail. Idly I opened it while thinking about wood stove ash. Idly I glanced at it while thinking about mulch. Puzzled about the ratio of gallons to cubic feet and months to days, I did a bit of division. Then I had a cow, as they say.
I accosted my poor husband very rudely. “We must have a leak somewhere! No way do the four of us use an average of 24.9 gallons a day!”
I tucked the children into bed while my husband the Data Fiend (DF) dug out two years of our water usage numbers, graphed it for me and then explained it to me, when he should have been using his precious evening moments to edit student grant proposals. I did not ask him to do this but he is a data superhero, and duty called. DF’s numbers say there is no new leak, and we really do use an average of about 28 gallons a day, varying from a low of around 20 to a high just above 30.
What a beautiful graph. Thank you, DF.
This sounded like a huge amount to me. I lived in the back of my truck in the Arizona desert for a little while, where I happily got by on about 10 gallons a week. I can assure you that while it is not very pleasant, I can get plenty clean with about half a gallon of freezing water, standing between cacti in the brisk December wind. My lifestyle has changed greatly since then, and my mental account of my personal water use had not caught up.
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