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Introduction. You Do Not Know How Much Water You Use Until

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Introduction You do not know how much water you use until you spend a week monitoring it. I spent a week measuring my daily water consumption, then extrapolated that data to estimate my yearly water usage. This paper aims to describe my methods of measuring my water usage, present my data and findings, and lastly compare my usage to the average person in America, China, Germany and Israel. Methods At first, measuring water usage seems like a trivial and easy task. However, I soon learned that it took a great deal of attention and consistency, along with a bit of creativity. Because we use water all day long in a number of different ways, I was constantly writing down what I was doing. I used the “notes” app in my phone to tally up my …show more content…

Judging off the age of the toilet, which looks extremely old, I concluded that it uses about 4 gallons per flush. On the other hand, what is interesting is that when I use a toilet on campus, I found that they only use 1.6 gallons per flush. For my shower I had to get a bit creative. I found a 2-gallon jug in my house and decided I would use that to measure my shower output. This took a great deal of strength and teamwork as the opening of the jug was not so big, so my roommate and I held the jug up close to the shower head. We timed that the jug filled up in about 1 minute and 3 seconds. Using a simple proportion, I found that my shower uses about 1.9 gallons of water per minute. I then timed every shower I took for the week with my phone. The average was about 8.33 minutes long with the longest lasting 9 minutes and the shortest lasting 7 minutes. The next thing for me to do was figure out how much water I drank daily. I used a 16-ounce plastic water bottle on Friday and Saturday, but determined that I was not getting enough water (See Appendix 1). On Sunday I bought a Nalgene bottle and started bringing it everywhere with me. The bottle holds 32 ounces and has measurements going up the side that made measuring my water intake very easy. Another interesting use for my Nalgene bottle was that it helped me visualize how much 32 ounces of water is. I was struggling to quantify how much water I used while brushing my teeth and shaving,

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