My Energy and Water Usage

My water usage and perhaps my energy usage are what I consider to be lower than average. I found a useful site which helped me to quantify my water usage per day, month, and year. It turns out I use:

67 gallons per day

2037 gallons per month

24455 gallons per year

That's a lot of water. My yearly amount is enough to fill a swimming pool that is 19' long, 38' wide, and 4.5' deep and then some. Chances are, at some point or another, I will swim in the water that I have used. Whether or not it is in a pool of that size is for me to decide.

Here is a graph I made to quantify my daily water usage by category:

As you can see, the majority of the water I use per day is spent either in the shower or hand washing dishes. I have never been one to take very long showers, but I am regardless surprised at the amount of water a 7 minute shower, once daily, requires. In general, I clean myself too much. I don't believe that I actually need to shower everyday. It is most often a matter of waking up in the morning, or comfort at night.

The fact that hand washing dishes uses the second largest amount of water is also somewhat surprising. My family did not get a dishwasher until I was a teenager, and even then the thing started to break down soon after we bought it because our water is very hard. I have a vivid memory of my Uncle Kevin teaching me how to correctly wash the dishes in a two part sink: one side is filled for sudsing, the other for rinsing. That always seemed to make sense to me.

The dishwasher I currently have is not nearly as large as the one I have at home, uses half as much water, and doesn't need fixing every 8 months. So the fact that it uses very little water on a daily basis does not surprise me one bit. I just need to break my habit of washing some dishes by hand. Not too easy.

My energy usage, on the other hand, was harder for me to quantify and visualize. My apartment as a whole used 273 kWh during the month of February, or 3276kWh per year. Divided by four that number is roughly 69 kWh. According to this, that is roughly one average lightning bolt's worth of energy, or half of the energy in one gallon of gasoline. Using that much energy is the equivalent of releasing 50 kgs of CO2 into the atmosphere. That means that I release, on average, 600 kgs of CO2 per year just from energy I use at home . That number is roughly the long-term limit that every person in the world should release per year to stabilize climate change.

That is a scary thought. As a rising "environmentalist," I feel as though I should be using waaaaay less energy.

Our average energy usage, like most other people, fluctuates on a regular basis. The majority of the energy used in my apartment is used by the larger appliances, i.e. the washer/dryer combo, the stove, the fridge, and the dishwasher. The other major usage of electricity in my apartment is due to lighting. I, along with my roommates, am pretty adamant about turning off lights when they don't need to be on.

We most certainly could do a better job making sure things are not plugged in when they don't need to be, despite the fact that this generally does not use too much wattage per day. However, it builds up over time.

The true fact of the matter is that the washer/dryer combo and the fridge are the two things that use the most energy. While I can't get rid of either, I most certainly need to rethink my habits, other wise I will continue to cause more harm than good.