Tuesday, January 8, 2008

How to calculate your water usage

Of course we've been cutting water usage at our house but I hadn't yet taken the step of calculating exactly how many gallons per day we were using. Putting it in terms of gallons makes it more real to me. The water bill actual shows "units" of usage which is more abstract and frankly not very helpful. ("One unit is equal to one hundred cubic feet (ccf) or 748 gallons of water.")

So I found a couple of useful links from The City of Durham's website that showed me how to calculate my usage:

How to read your water bill & calculate usage from that information.

and

How to find and read your water meter and calculate usage from that information.


Doing the calculations, it looks like that in my household (2 people) we averaged 33 gallons per person per day for the period of time from 9/12/2007 to 11/10/2007.

We're going to try to get it lower, shooting for the 25 gallons per day that Barry blogged about here.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is great! Everyday we hear that we need to reduce water consumption, but until reading this I didn't know how to find out how much water I'm actually using.

Durham Bull Pen said...

kat: translating water "units" to gallons has helped me become even more aware of conserving. Can't wait to get my new bill to see how my usage compares with the last billing cycle.

How low can I go--and still be welcome in public?