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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

> The average American household uses around 1135 litres of water per day.

What the fuck are y'all doing with over 1 cubic meter of water a day?! Germans are at 126 liters a day and head, about 10% of the average American [1].

[1] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/daten/private-haushalte-konsu...

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A few things here - 1) TFA is referencing household use, and you're referencing individual use, and 2) the linked source from TFA doesn't actually give the 1135L/day stat. What it gives is this: "Each American uses an average of 82 gallons of water a day at home" which is ~310 liters.

Also, it's not clear if your source is including water use for home irrigation and recreation (lawns and pools?), whereas the US source is.

I don't think the distinction between indoors or outdoors usage is relevant, in the end we are still talking about the volume of drinkable water people use. Whether they use it for drinking, cooking, washing, or watering the lawn.

My guess is that the average is very different than the median here. In general there are a few considerations:

- Green lawns are considered a status symbol in the US and in many higher end neighborhoods houses run irrigation multiple times a day.

- Same goes for pools.

- Baths are common (especially for kids) and use a fair amount of water.

- Our toilets and showers are not efficient.

- We tend to do laundry and dishes with machines (though I'm not sure if that would really use more or less water).

I also suspect that number may include industrial and commercial. Since even considering the above it still seems high.

> - Our toilets and showers are not efficient.

You can't make blanket claims about the US as a whole for things that are driven by the states - many states have highly restrictive shower/toilet efficiency requirements.

Whenever I’m in the states and see the urinal “American Standard” 1 gpf (gallon per flush) I cry in Australian.

American Standard sells urinals with water use as low as 1/8 (0.125) gallons per flush.

https://www.americanstandard-us.com/urinals-list

(I only thought of this because the urinals at the companies I've worked at over the past decade proudly displayed these 1/8-gallon numbers.

.. and plenty of urinals are completely water free...

And they uniformly stink...

How much is the gpf or lpf in Australia?

In Australia, they're measured in pints

You are right, I cannot generalize. In fact our main flush function in newer toilets is the same flow as almost all countries (Australia and Japan being the exceptions) but we also have far fewer "Duel Flush" toilets (apparently, I'm just learning this myself) and the low flow on duel flush toilets uses much less water.

Washing dishes with the machine actually tends to save quite a lot of water, as long as you actually fill the machine.

> as long as you actually fill the machine

That's more or less what I suspected. Though... and I'm not sure if this is an American thing, an international thing, or just a weird quirk of the specific people I know... I know several people who run their machines every day even if they aren't even close to full.

I'm not a fan of letting dirty dishes sit. Dried on food doesn't come off as easily.

A dishwasher is so much more efficient than handwashing dishes that it's going to save water even without being anywhere close to full.

> - We tend to do laundry and dishes with machines (though I'm not sure if that would really use more or less water).

Dish washers save water, also those are machines that Germans also use.

Fair enough, that was the one that seemed most questionable even as I wrote it.

I could not believe that number but indeed its 300 gallons per day: https://www.epa.gov/watersense/how-we-use-water

That is about 1350 (!) liters per day

70% is used inside the house, meaning 945 liters

there is something of a difference between 'per household' (US) and 'per head (Germany). So maybe introduce a factor of 4.something and the US doesn't look _quite_ as extravagant, or Germany _quite_ as frugal, depending on which way you look at it

As other posters have pointed out, that is the household number. The individual number is ~300 liters per day. But, ignoring that point, even if it were 1000 extra liters per person, 1000 liters is only ~0.40$ of desalinated water.

These Americans spending 40 more cents a day, what profligacy, what waste! Why, if they scrimp and save their water, they could buy one extra Starbucks drink every 10 days. 10 days!

And that is desalinated water which massively more expensive and is completely non-viable economically compared to regular sources of water.

It should be no wonder why the average American does not have different habits with regard to water usage. There is no real freshwater crisis in wealthy countries with enough lead time to build out desalination capacity.

You could argue there is still a environmental crisis if we allocated that much additional energy to desalination, but I leave that as a separate discussion.

America is a big country and the numbers vary greatly by state. Individuals in Connecticut on average use 35 gallons per day, not as great as Germans but close. Compared to states like Wyoming or Idaho with 176 gallons and 186 gallons per person, respectively.

From "Estimated Use of Water in the United States in 2015" which is the source cited by the EPA page. https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1441/circ1441.pdf

I'm assuming that some of that number is mixing in industrial uses of water?

That is, I'd love to say it is something silly like US people shower/bathe far more, but I have a hard time seeing how personal uses of water can add up to that in any way.

If you find a good read on this, please share it!

No, this is the domestic usage, not including industrial processes. And industrial processes exist everywhere in the world anyway.

That tracks with what I would largely expect, but https://www.worldometers.info/water/ has Germany at 856? That has the US at 3732. Such that I don't think I can just correct up.

Sounds like a lot of ambiguity on what different people are measuring, which is obnoxious. Understandable, mind. Still obnoxious.

Bathing, pooping, washing things, and watering lawns.

And you're comparing individuals vs. households.

Watering our yards instead of living in cramped comblock apartments?

> The average American family uses more than 300 gallons of water per day at home. Roughly 70 percent of this use occurs indoors.

70% of the usage is from inside homes [0], not watering yards. No fucking idea how.

[0] https://www.epa.gov/watersense/how-we-use-water

Reading about levels of energy, water and other resources used by Americans makes it much harder to sympathise when they complain about cost of living.

Liberty costs 1,009 gallons of water per day :P

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