Water saving - the results

I recently posted about California's latest drought and water usage.  In that series I mentioned two simple changes I made at home to save water, I installed High Sierra low-flow shower heads and the HydroRight dual-flush toilet conversion kit.  It has been several months since I installed those products so I wanted to report back on how much water we are saving.

• In the 6 months before installing these products, my family used an average of 173 gallons of water per day.
• In the 3 months after installing these products, my family used an average of 115 gallons of water per day.
• That's an average savings of 58 gallons of water per day.

Saving 58 gallons of water per day may not sound like a lot, but it adds up quickly.  Over a year we'll save approximately 21,000 gallons of water.  That's more water than an average-sized backyard swimming pool.

Here is a graph showing our water usage over the past 9 months.  As you can see the first 6 months are clearly higher than the last 3 months.

As far as cost savings, we saved an average of $11.85 on our monthly water bill.  The new shower heads and toilet products cost about $160 to install them in my house.  At that rate it will take 13 months to break even, and after that we'll save about $140 a year.


There were a couple of details about my water bill and usage that are worth mentioning.  Anyone who knows about water usage knows that 115 gallons of water per day for 4 people is extremely low.  That's an average of less than 30 gallons per person per day, but most places use between 100 and 200 gallons of water per person per day.  So how is ours so low?  There are two reasons.

1. The biggest reason is the fact we don't have to water our landscaping which is the single largest use of water for a typical home.  In our neighborhood our landscaping and yards are watered by the HOA, so that watering goes on their water meter and not mine.  On the plus side, our neighborhood uses reclaimed water for landscaping so we're not wasting good water just to have a green lawn.
2. My family has always been good about saving water, even before installing these products.  For example, we never took long showers and we didn't always flush the toilet for just liquids (as the saying goes - "If it's yellow, let it mellow. If it's brown, flush it down").

When I started this endeavor I wasn't sure how much water we would save.  I knew we were frugal with our water to begin with so I wasn't expecting much.  But to save almost 60 gallons of water per day definitely exceeded my expectations.  I hope that seeing our results has encouraged you to try water saving in your house.