The Water Audit: Part One

I started with water because it seemed like the simplest to do, initially.  Water isn’t a particular problem up in the Pacific Northwest, but there may be upcoming water shortages worldwide if global warming hits full force, so I should understand my impact.

Luckily, my water billing provider made this really easy for me. I simply went to http://www.ista-na.com and was able to access the my full water usage history since I’ve been in this condominium.

Of course, if this hadn’t been available online, auditing my water usage would have been a fairly trivial matter of reading my meter on a semi-regular basis, and jotting down the readings.

Here is my water usage for the past three years (scale in gallons):

The spikes aren’t really indicative of usage, but of a bill they forgot to send to me, so there are two months of usage under that number.

On average, our household uses 123.74 gallons of water a day, averaging out to 3712.3 gallons a month.

How does this stack up?  Not too badly. According to a UN study, the average American household uses 153 gallons per person, per day.  We don’t have a yard to care for, so our water usage falls significantly below that, somewhere closer to the usage of Austria or Denmark.

 

That doesn’t mean we couldn’t do better.  The UK somehow has extremely low water usage, though they have similar living standards to ours.

I’m curious how our daily water usage breaks out to contribute to this number, so I’m going to start to track our daily stats.  More to come on this.