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Re: GBlist: residential water usage
Chris Koehn asked:
>Anyone know the average per household water usage per day in the U.S.?
>
The following data comes from a water and wastewater engineering course I
took back in 1992; I don't know if the numbers have changed much since then,
and I don't know what the professor's published source was.
USA average: 60-100 gpcd for residential use,
total of 166 gpcd (gallons per capita per day) including
commercial,
industrial, public use, and system losses (i.e., leaks)
Other municipal averages, total consumption:
Dallas 161 gpcd
Houston 250 gpcd
LA 181
Tulsa 157
Other countries:
U.K. 71 gpcd
Japan (Tokyo) 77
W. Germany 46
Switzerland 107
Egypt 26
Pakistan 19
India 14
Spain 44
Makes you think we could be using a *lot* less, doesn't it? The minimum
required to support life is 1-1.5 gpcd.
In the U.S., residential use breaks down like this:
toilets 41%
washing 37%
kitchen 11%
laundry 4%
cleaning 3%
lawns 3%
car washing 1%
Those figures are national averages. I promise, in the fancy suburb nearest
us (Plano, Texas), summertime water use is much more than 3% -- probably a
lot more%. The average water use there is 15,000 gallons per month per
household (annualized). That's about 125 gpcd, assuming a four-person family
and a 30-day month.
At our house, with low-flow fixtures (but 1.6 gpf toilets) and 1600-gallon
cistern for landscape water, we use an average of 33.3 gpcd. And we don't
even have a very efficient washing machine, sorry to say!
Hope this helps!
---Elena Westbrook, ELS
WordWright Communications
EWestbrook@topher.net
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