We’re always very frugal and because of that more environmentally friendly than most people in the developed world. We live way below our means and try to save for the future and don’t use too many resources because of that.
When I first saw our water usage I found it to be staggering. Everybody tells us that we use so little water it’s crazy. They all use 3x, 5x or more than what we use1.
If we look at the raw numbers using 1000 liters of water a month (we’re 2 people) is a lot. But I’ve also heard of people that use 500 liters a day.
Some simple math: 1000 liters / 30 days = 33,333333333 liters a day / 2 people =
16,666666666 liters per person a day
The average for Europe is 144 liters per person per day. If you use that much you could start looking at ways to reduce that without being too much of an annoyance.
I think using almost 20 liters a day is ok. It still feels like a lot when we just look at the number itself, but when you factor in everything you use it for, you can’t really go much lower than that. It is not impossible to do if you really want to, but you really need to be meticulous and cut on a lot of things most people would consider essential so that’s going too far.
We still didn’t finish moving in to the new apartment properly so I assume that our consumption is going to slightly increase in the future, especially once we start using the washing machine regularly. Shouldn’t be too much of a deviation though, hopefully. I expect it not to exceed 20 in the short to medium term.
During this quest I found out that most toilets use 5 liters every single flush.
Water consumption examples (some of these may be old):
- California
- Amsterdam
- Canada
- Online Forum
- Europe
- Europe by country
- Europe by country with map (Page 409)
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But I’ve also heard people that use 500 liters of water a day. ↩