Home Water Audit

It’s important to save water because of all the water on the planet only 3% of it is drinkable and in a lot of areas that grow yearly water is extremely hard to come by. Water is essential for life and without it planet Earth would not be the green place we like to call home.

My score was 31 so in the 18 to 36 Great job! You are on your way to saving hundreds of gallons of water a month range.

Things I have done to improve my water usage is take fewer showers. On days I don’t do a lot of activity or get to dirty I skip taking a shower. This has cut me down to 4 to 5 showers a week so this saves at least 10 mins of water use every week. Also I have been turning off the water while I lather up with soap or shampoo this also cuts down on mins with each shower which on average saves another 4 to 5 mins for the remaining 20 to 25 mins a week I use to shower. Problems I find with this are not huge but are somewhat hindering. First it has been getting colder in the last few weeks and I shower on the bottom floor of our townhouse where temperatures are lowest so I fight with my body every time I turn the water off while showering in the warm water. This has not stopped me from doing it but when winter comes around I think this will be a harder fight. Secondly occasionally I share a shower with my boyfriend and I have to really argue with him when I go to turn off the water. In a way by us sharing the shower I think water is saved by combining the time but he really doesn’t want me to turn off the water when we go to use the soap or shampoo.(I am glad I don’t have to present this. I don’t mind telling you this but I really would feel uncomfortable telling the class this…)

Other ways I have tried to save water is making sure I have a full load of laundry or dishes before starting the washers. I did this before but now that I am making a conscience effort I only do laundry once a week if I can help it and about 2 to 3 loads in the dishwasher. My appliances are energy star and I set them to eco when washing if dishes or cloths aren’t heavily soiled. This saves a lot more water but in the scoring it doesn’t seem to take these 4 things in the overall score.

I also contacted my development management and asked this to lessen how often they used the sprinklers since it was clearly overwatering (we started to see mushrooms) They told me that it had been cut down to 3 times a week instead of 7 and was set to run for 10 mins instead of 15. This saved a ton of water but again was not mentioned in the overall scoring. When I saw the president again he said that he intended to fully shut off the sprinkler system within this week so fingers crossed for that. 

Other areas it mentioned was only using little water when taking a bath. I don’t so that is an area that I had to put often since it’s not even a factor as well as putting water in the sink when washing up again I don’t so I don’t waste water there unless its referring to handwashing if that’s the case I don’t run it until after  I use the soup. Using a broom to sweep up my driveway or sidewalk was on there I don’t do that really but I think it means instead of spraying if off which I have never done. I am not trying to cheat on the test but the only way to reflect that I don’t do it is to say I do it often to show improvement in the scoring. After all this and not really being able to change the shower changes my score was 34. So a noticeable improvement.

Other things I will try to do in the future is install water saving faucets on my sinks and showers. I will start using gray water to water plants when I am able to make a garden in my back yard instead of a sprinkler system. I will look into having them cut off the sprinkler permanently in my back yard if possible.

Another site I did was http://www.home-water-works.org

How Do I Compare? After changes

This is how my water use compares to other households in the same geographic area with the same number of residents and landscape size as me.

I also included another water audit I did prior to this which calculated that I use 159 gallons per day compared to the 207 DWA average per day. I will attach that as well.

  How are your values expressed through your project?

Self-awareness helped me to see where I could improve and make that conscience decision to use less water. I always try to follow the motto if something is worth doing than it’s worth doing right. This is something my father always said and by following that self-driven mindset I have been able to make a lot of improvement throughout my life. Health wise this determination has helped me lose a lot of weight in fact 80 pounds from January to May in 2012 and to quit smoking after doing so for 6ish years and now why not a lifelong change to save water. I hope my passion and drive follows through in this change as well as others in the future to help lessen my ecological footprint. I am a very pro-active person and when I see a problem I am not happy until it’s been addressed. I may have kind of, sort of jumped down the housing maintenances neck around here to get it down fast but they needed to know how much they were wasting unnecessarily.

  How did your thinking about your project evolve over time (point to specific experiences while working on the assignment)? How did the assignment evolve (or not evolve) with your thinking (again, point to specific experiences) about it?

At first I thought I was doing pretty good for water saving but when I did the numbers and realized how much would be saved just by shutting off the water while soaping up or taking less showers a week saves over a year the numbers were huge. This and the other small changes I made saved 34.5 a day, 12,595 gallons a year! My process didn’t evolve per say since I just thought of what I would do and did it, but how it evolved my thinking, was to consider what I am doing each and every time I turned on the nozzle.