BY PSC Chair Charlotte Lane
EPA says our average showerhead has a water flow of 2.1 gallons per minute. And that the average shower each of us takes is eight minutes long.
Your daily shower uses an average of more than 16 gallons of water. That’s a lot of water, and few of us think about its impact.
Using those figures, you could take 625 showers for the average 10,000 gallons of water the Environmental Protection Agency says is lost yearly in households in the United States. That’s a lot of cleaning.
Showering accounts for 17 percent of household water usage.
Nationally, we use 1.2 trillion gallons of water yearly just for showering.
How much is that?
Well, it is enough to supply New York and New Jersey with all the water those states need in one year.
So, I would like you to consider swapping out your current shower heads with WaterSense-labeled shower heads. These devices are approved and recommended by the EPA.
WaterSense is a voluntary partnership program supported by the EPA. The agency says the WaterSense label identifies independently certified products that use at least 20 percent less water while performing as well or better than regular items.
In addition to helping conserve water, they will also make a considerable difference to your wallet, too.
The average family could save 2,700 gallons of water a year by simply installing these devices,
Think about it.
And while you’re at it, I would like you to think about having WaterSense-labeled toilets installed in your home.
Toilets account for nearly 30 percent of an average home’s indoor water consumption. They are by far the largest source of water usage in a home.
Older, inefficient toilets that use as much as 6 gallons per flush also account for wasted water in homes.
Improved devices now use 1.28 gallons per flush, or less, while providing equal or better performance when compared to standard toilets. EPA says that’s 20 percent less water than the current federal standard of 1.6 gallons per flush.
Changing toilets could mean a savings of about 13,000 gallons of water yearly.
That could mean a savings of more than $140 per year in water costs and $2,900 over the lifetime of the toilets.
These are little things but could have a mighty impact if we all consider switching to these new devices.
Change is not often easy, but change that makes sense and puts cents into your pocket might be worth investigating.
