Perceptions vs Realities and Your Water Bill
Ask a person how much water they use in a given day, and they’ll be hard pressed to come up with an answer. 10 gallons? 50? 100? It’s a tough call to average man on the street. And when you start adding up all that uses water around the house – toilets, showers, faucets, dishwashers, clothes washers, irrigation, cooking – you can see that all the variables can make it even harder!
What’s interesting is in the a case study of the 10 households in the Serenbe community that are participating in the American Standard retrofit program all consistently overestimated their water use based on actual consumption history. In fact, 75% of the residents, when asked about their water consumption habits (loads of laundry, shower lengths, etc) came in higher than their water bills actually recorded – with an average overestimation of 30%!
That’s quite a difference. The big question is, if you think you are using more water than you really are, will you be more inclined to reduce your consumption? The downside is most of the participants hadn’t really thought about their consumption habits prior to starting this study – an often too common problem in the battle for water conservation.
One reason for this is in most areas of the country, water is so ridiculously cheap it doesn’t matter how much you use. Saving 10 gallons here isn’t even a dime on your water bill. The other issue is that water bills are often confusing and its difficult to tell how much water is really being used.
Take for example the water bills issued by the City of Atlanta for the folks in the Serenbe community. Each month they get a bill that says they have a water fee and sewer fee, and they have used 5 units of water. What the heck is 5 units of water, and how does that come out to my water and sewer bill? Let’s take it one part at a time. Your bill likely has a fee for water use and sewer use, both of which are based off of how much water comes through the meter at your house. Utilities typically assume that the same amount of water coming into your house (your water bill) is the same amount leaving in the sewer (your sewer bill). Thus the two fees are directly related. Now if you have an irrigation system that is on the same meter as your interior water use, you get doubly hit, as the irrigation water isn’t going into the sewer and you shouldn’t be charged for it. That’s why most utilities allow you to have a separate meter for irrigation so you’re not double penalized (though you should really work to eliminate the need for irrigation at your house to begin with!).
The good news is that if you lower your home water consumption, you’ll lower not only your water bill but also your sewer bill (and likely your electric bill, but that is for another post). Less water coming into your house, less going into the sewer – everybody wins
Now what about that 5 units of water? Water is often (and definitely in this case) in a unit of hundreds of cubic feet, shown as CCF. Thus 5 units equals 5 hundred cubic feet of water being consumed. What the heck does that mean? Well, the conversion is easy enough, 1 CCF (or hundred cubic feet) = 748 gallons of water, so 5 CCF = 3740 gallons. It’s a pretty straightforward conversion, however not always the most accurate. By measuring in such large units, it doesn’t give a clean representation of the actual water consumption. Does 1 CCF translate to 473 gallons used or 747? It’s a tough rounding number to get to that unit of CCF.
This will also make it interesting to see how the residents at Serenbe will be able to see the savings from this retrofit program – a 20% reduction will drop monthly use from 5 CCF to 4 – but as you’ve seen, there’s a lot of wiggle room with 748 gallons needed to show an actual reduction….
In a few months when data collection is complete, I’ll provide an update and we’ll see how those real life savings were recorded at the meter….
Tags: water conservation, water in georgia