On the 1st August 2020 I began my WATERTIGHT Challenge. My aim was to spend 2 months living in a water shortage scenario. During this experiment, I hope to get a profound insight into what life might be like for us all over the coming decades as we experience periods of increasingly severe water shortage. My WATERTIGHT Challenge began full of optimism – this is the story of my first week.
What I hadn’t expected was for my 2-month WATERTIGHT Challenge to start with such a shock. I had a quick look back through our water bills for the last 2 years and discovered to my horror that we have been using, on average, ever increasing amounts of water in our household (of two adults and one cat) during that time.
From July 2018 to July 2019, we used 124 cubic metres of water, which equates to an average of 170 each per day (the average in the South West is a little over 150 litres per person per day apparently). Over the following year this increased to 190 litres each per day and in July 2020 (during COVID-19 lock-down) our water use reached 228 litres each per day….!!
WHAT…!? No way. That cannot be right. We must have a leak. What have we been doing to use that much water….both of us using over 70 litres overs the average per day…?
DAY 1 – GETTING TO GRIPS WITH THE METER…AND THE SLUGS..!
August 1st 2020, the first day of my WATERTIGHT Challenge was spent getting to grips with taking meter readings (see my separate GUIDE TO YOUR WATER METER in the WATERTIGHT Library) and this included dealing with a huge number of slugs who have apparently taken up residence in the deep pipe at the bottom of which our meter is to be found.
On Day 1, I also tried to identify all of the different ways and means we use water and to keep a tally of how many times we do these different things…Over 20 toilet flushes (I lost count to be honest), 30 hand washes, quite a bit of washing up and 2 showers. Interestingly, we didn’t use the washing machine or the dishwasher on Day 1 (see Day 2 diary entry for more on this).
DAY 2 – A DAY OF TWO HALVES
The second day of my WATERTIGHT Challenge really was a day of two halves. It began with sense of real optimism that inspired by my finding that our 24 hour water use on Day 1 had been just 224 litres (112 litres each). In addition, I then took delivery of my new shiny rain gauge which I am going to deploy in the garden to show how much rain it takes to fill our water butts…very exciting…!!
Then things took a downturn. First, I had a look in the water butt and it was completely empty (the other two are currently out of commission). Then I looked at the recent rainfall data for Exeter, which showed that we had only 1-2 millimetres of rain in July, and then I looked at long term forecast and discovered that we were not expecting any rain for the foreseeable future…not much point having a rain gauge for that [and it still hasn’t rained significantly since – NP 07/08/2020]….!?
At this point, I got a bit carried away and, because we had used both the washing machine and the dishwasher already that day, decided to check the meter again in the evening. This time it showed that we had used 375 litres already on Day 2 (~188 litres each) and I realised how much effort this challenge was really going to take.
Roll on Day 3…!!
DAY 3 – AN EXPERIMENT ON AN AGEING WASHING MACHINE
Determined to get to the bottom of our high levels of water use and having worked out everywhere we use water in our household, I decided to systematically assess how much of these activities used. The first target for investigation was the washing machine.
The video below shows the results of my experiment and you can read my new WATERTIGHT Guide to saving water when doing your washing – HERE.
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