The average American uses about 29,930 gallons of water per year[1]. The figure of 326,000 gallons is enough for 3 families of four people. However, water usage varies wildly in the US by region and housing type.

[1] https://www.epa.gov/watersense/statistics-and-facts.

That's 82 gallons per day. Or 372 liters. Quite a lot.

A standard (inefficient) US toilet uses 1.28 gallons every time you flush it. Lets assume you have four people per household maybe using the toilet about 6 times per day, each. That's almost 30 gallons right there. The average shower takes about 15 gallons. So times four that's 60 gallons right there. Adds up to 80 gallons already. That's before you turn on the washing machine, the dishwasher, watering the lawn, making tea, etc. 82 sounds about right but also very wasteful.

The question of course is could the US do better? And why would it? As it turns out, a lot of places treat water like an almost free commodity. Hence the complete disregard for toilet and shower inefficiencies. If people would pay for it by the gallon at a reasonable amount, they'd fix it. But they aren't.

Say you'd price it a 10 cents per gallon. A 15 gallon shower now costs you 1.50$. Maybe you'd install some water saving shower head and shower bit less long. The actual price is closer to a 1000 gallons for that price. Hence the average American not giving a shit when they flush the toilet, take a shower, etc.

Water isn't cheap to source anymore. Especially if you live in a desert. Taking water from unsustainable sources has the downside that those sources run out eventually. Especially if they are not being replenished naturally anymore. That's what is happening in a lot of places. Water isn't scarce though. Our planet is covered in it. All we need to do is separate it from salt (and our waste) and we can have as much as we want of it. But it comes at a price.

I checked our water bill yesterday (Los Angeles), and found we average well over 82 gallons a day. I'm trying to figure out why. Household of 3, no lawns, lots of succulents (a couple fruit trees but we're not crazy about watering). So our water use is largely: daily shower, dishwasher, toilet, sink, washing machine, and reverse osmosis water faucet. We had a crappy tankless water heater for a few years, so I actually removed the water saving shower faucets and sink aerators. I got a new tankless, so now I want to put back on the water saving faucets and see how that impacts results.

But... I was surprised. I could definitely shorten my showers.

Reverse osmosis throws a lot of water down the drain to keep the filters from clogging. I'm just an hour or so south of you and get the water doesn't taste incredible out of the sink, but I got a Pur countertop water filter which gets the chalky taste out without wasting any water, might be worth a try? Reverse osmosis is pretty intense if your water coming out of the pipe is treated, it's better suited for people with totally untreated water IMO

My guess would be that the RO filter is dumping a bunch. They seem to use 4 gallons for every 1 gallon of filtered water [1]. I personally do't like RO water, it tastes off to me and I appreciate having a. little fluoride in my water to fight off tooth decay.

[1]https://americanhomewater.com/the-truth-about-reverse-osmosi...

I lived overseas for a bit somewhere where you have to have an RO filter to drink from the tap. Nearly every filter on the market has mineral restoration packs which I think help with that bland water RO taste. One of the servicemen who changed our filters once warned us that the calcium in our purifier was so low that our bones would lose calcium. While I don’t know if I believe it, it was interesting to learn that minerals in drinking water can benefit health

I kind of miss making coffee with water out of that purifier though, it tasted noticeably better

Like I said, my main concern would be the fluoride. I actually really like the water here in NYC tastes great and seems good for baking, brewing beer, and coffee. Though I've never tried RO coffee.

You could try reading the meter and going without one thing each day - but maybe the reverse osmosis filter flushes itself too often?

How old are your toilets? Old toilets could use as much as 7 gallons per flush 30+ years ago. Modern toilets use 1.6 gpf or less. Swapping out a 3gpf toilet that came with the house for a modern one made a helluva difference in my usage.

Since 32% of all of American water use is irrigation, I'd probably start with improvements and moves towards more drip irrigation. For domestic use, toilets seem to represent ~24% of use, so moving to dual flush toilets could probably make a big dent. Outdoor water use for homes contribute between 30% and 60% depending on region so discouraging green laws in arid regions is probably a good idea, and that seems to be happening.

Compare that to Germany, where the average water consumption per household is 12439 gallons per person per year [1]. Sounds to me like Americans are particularly wasteful with their water consumption.

[1] https://www.bdew.de/service/daten-und-grafiken/entwicklung-d... (figure shows liters per day, 129 liters per day are about 12438.5 gallons per year)

Toilets and lawns probably contribute a lot to this difference.

If you take the US average of 138 gallons per day and take that out to a year 1 acre-foot is about 6.5 households but out west you probably get more water usage for lawns and things like cooling which is more likely to use swamp coolers than the rest of the US so it's possible.

[0] 138 gallons per day is a little over 190k L/yr https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=138+gallons+per+day+to+...

edit: 138 figure from here. Just took the google knowledge box answer: https://www.watercalculator.org/footprint/indoor-water-use-a...

So ironically, water usage is higher per household where water is more scarce.

That's just my guess at the difference. It could also be a figure including other things like the per household usage for hydro-electric power like some other people have guessed in this thread. That would fit with the other mentions of losing hydro-electric power if the lake level were to fall too low.

I had a city issued smart water meter at my last residence with 5-6 residents. I set a text message alert at 400 gallons per day, as that was a very unusual event that might warrant attention. I had high efficiency showers, toilets, and washers. I only ever hit it, and well exceeded it, when I did something like water the lawn a few times a year. A high watermark estimate (har har) would be 400 x 365 = 146000. I suppose two households is plausible, but I'd guess more like three to four for 326000.

Where I live, in a very wet part of ther United States, water is still too expensive for watering the lawn regularly. This is usually because the meter reading is used to assess charges for sewer as well. Those who do have irrigation systems request second meters to avoid sewer charges or even tap into the gray water supply.

The fact that decorative lawns exist at all is indicative of water not being expensive enough.

Edit: By decorative, I mean the manicured lawns that are only for aesthetics that require tons of watering and sprinkler systems, and pesticides/insecticides/fertilizers.

Aren't all lawns decorative?

There is value in tick control around a residence. For that, grass is the most practical ground cover. Anything beyond the bare minimum is an excess.

Wouldn't dirt, sand, or rocks work just fine?

Not if that dirt grows tall weeds. Many lawns don't need to be irrigated at all.

Where I live in the Northeast, the natural state of a patch of dirt--or for that matter a patch of gravel--will be to become a forest in most cases by way of grass, weeds, bushes, and trees.

To some degree. But there are a lot of reasons to keep some sort of buffer around the house in any case. Now (unless required by local regulation/HOA/etc.), this doesn't necessary mean a perfectly manicured Kentucky bluegrass lawn but in a lot of the country just letting nature take its course will have tall grass, bushes, and eventually trees growing right up to the foundations.

Midwest ground becomes a lawn without any real effort. Maybe seed it a bit.

To imitate that in the southwest you usually need irrigation.

Where I live, the sewer charges for the year are based off of your water usage during the coolest, wettest months of the year in winter. My water usage (3 person household) is about 80% higher in the 3 hottest summer months. The rest of the year, there is no need to water anything unless you planted a completely inappropriate landscape or you enjoy seeing your money runoff into the storm sewers.

I pulled my figures for the past year. We used approx 36,000 gallons in household use and 9,000 gallons in irrigation/outdoors use. Effectively, my lawn is equivalent to one additional person living in our home.

It's tricky in a transitional zone. One week of extreme heat and dry weather can erase a lawn that survived a decade. For ~7500 sqft of lawn, you can get by with about 1500 gallons for each of three days and have a good chance of surviving that event.

I find that most of the time, it's not the heat or dry that's killing lawns, it's disease and pests. If I was foolish enough to water fescue regularly in the summer heat, I would lose it to dollar spot or brown patch. I've been completely wrecked by web worm while on vacation. I have a new residence with a larger lot and plan to switch away from fescue once I've lived here a few seasons. I'm also convinced the USDA 2012 hardiness zone map is overdue for an update. Regardless, I'm not going back to a high maintenance lawn.

That is in terms of electrical power generation by hydroelectric dams.

Homes are but a drop in the bucket for water consumption when compared with agricultural use.. Many states still use flood irrigation to water crops.

I thought it meant 1 acre-foot provides enough electricity at the dam for 2 households for 1 year?

You might be right, though I'd still say that seems like a lot of water...

https://extension.colostate.edu/topic-areas/family-home-cons... :

Water supply planners estimate that a typical household needs 0.4 -0.5 acre feet of water per year (approximately 150,000 gal) to satisfy the demands of a home and landscape.

I have to believe that a lot of that is the landscape part. I admittedly live by myself but if I do the math right, it looks like I use about 3,000 gallons a year--virtually none of which is used outside the house.

3,000 gallons a year comes out to 8.2 gallons per day. Seems a bit low. Even a low flow toilet uses 1.1-1.6 gallons per flush.

In my experience, with a family of 4, a lawned landscape is gonna take up about 50-70% of your water use in SoCal. This is based upon living in a couple of places down here.

Also, pools are a giant red herring. A noncovered pool would take up about 5% of that above water budget. Once you cover it it consumes basically no water (once filled).

Note that drought tolerant grasses use upwards of 60% less water than standard lawns. And subsurface irrigation uses upwards of 70% less water. Still not a good idea to have tons of the stuff, but if you want a small patch of it you can do so without blowing the water budget. Most people don't do this though.

I'm usually at my town $50 minimum and my last quarterly bill was for 100 cu.ft. So 3,000 gallons a year. I would say that of course I'm not there all the time--and pre-COVID I travelled a lot--but not true at the moment. I did grow up in a house with a poor water supply from a well so I probably have a lot of habits related to not running water unnecessarily. I agree it seems low but that's what the numbers say. (And, as I say, this is mostly just one person.)

I live in New England and haven't watered my lawn since it was established and rarely water gardens. Even if things can get a bit brown during the summer, they come back.

Are you sure there isn't a base amount of water usage captured in the minimum charge? 2 toilet flushes a day (1 solid, 1 liquid) and a 3 minute shower gets you to 8 gals/day before you've washed any dishes or clothes.

I mean, if you are able to keep your water use that low, congrats and keep it up. We could all use more people like you. In reality, I'm guessing you are using a bit more than that however.

It's the actual amount on my water bill. And yeah. 2-3 toilet flushes a day. Probably a 3 minute shower. A gallon or two for plants. The biweekly high-efficiency washer. (And I'm sometimes traveling but much less so recently.) The weekly dishwash. Etc. Surprises me too. But that's what the numbers say. Not even trying to be unusually convervationist.

Be a bit aggressive and assume the number is 365,000 gallons - that means 1000 gallons per day. Statistics from a perfunctory Google search seem to indicate around 300 gal/day/household, so it seems about right if a bit on the high side.

That's ~900 Gal/Day which sounds pretty high for 1 or 2 households but I suppose if they are large and have large lawns or something it could be reasonable. I would naively think it is closer to 5 to 10 households.

According to my water company I used about 67,300 gallons of water the past year, which is about 300,000 L. It's not out of the ballpark.

That does seem like an astonishingly high number, but I guess there is quite a range of water requirements across the country.

To put this in context, it's 10x the water we use in our house in the UK, and I don't think we're particularly low in our water usage (we work out to be around 300 litres a day).

> Ohio where my monthly water bill I think has never exceeded $25

My sewer bill in Seattle is over $120. That isn't for water, that is just the price of getting the water out of my house! (My water bill is half that, go figure!)

This was winter/spring, so just this is just laundry, showering, and doing dishes.

I think average US household water usage is around 250-500 gallons per day. So 326k gal per year for 2 households isn’t that far off.

250 gallons a day? Where would someone use that much water? Are they filling their tub 10 times a day?

People use far more water than they should and water is much cheaper than it should be. $25 in water could very well be this much, you'd have to check your bill to see what volume you use.

My town charges $3 per CCF (748 gallons). The biggest challenge to getting residents to alter their usage is that that number gets lost amongst all of the fixed charges. If I turned off my meter for a month, I'd still face $85 in fixed charges. My lowest water bill of the past year was $91 and the highest was $106. Typical bill is $94.

The water usage rates are pretty much noise for all but the poorest families.

> One acre-foot

These units seem to be deliberately obtuse.

I've mostly heard it used by farmers. And it makes sense if you're thinking of the equivalent rainfall measured in inches on a property measured in acres.

I think it's a perfect descriptor - makes me picture an acre of land (footprint) with a height of 1 ft

ca 1200 cubic meters

In general American houses seem to use enormous amounts of basically everything.