What's Your Water Usage "Footprint"?
Monday, August 6, 2012 at 02:18PM by Catherine Hart 
The folks at H2O Conserve have come up with a clever, easy way for people to assess how much water they use day-to-day and they offer a ton of suggestions for reducing your water "footprint". (This is one time I felt grateful to fall in the "below average" category.) See how you do and be sure to click on the "learn more" button on each page.
You may be surprised at how quickly water usage adds up. Here are a couple of the many tidbits of information you can glean from the survey:
If you use a low-flow showerhead, you can save about 15 gallons of water during a 10 minute shower! After a year of daily showering, that adds up to almost 5,500 gallons—not just a drop in the bucket!
[It seems there is a common misperception that a "low-flow" showerhead equals an unsatisfying shower. Technology is such that the typical "low-flow" models provide a satisfying, if not stronger, water stream than do conventional showerheads.]
Did you know that turning off the water when you brush your teeth saves 2 to 5 gallons of water each time you brush? For a family of four this could add up to over 10,000 gallons per year!
These are some impressive numbers. Water prices vary widely across the country, but if you take an average cost of a penny a gallon, the amount of water you could potentially save on just these two suggestions adds up to $155! Think of what you could do with that money, rather than watch it go down the drain.
Water prices are also expected to shoot up dramatically, perhaps even triple, over the next 25 years. It will pay to get in the habit of paying closer attention to how you use the precious resource that flows from your faucets.