Project Update

In my introduction post, I said I would monitor water usage in my house over Thanksgiving weekend. Thankfully, my family was very cooperative and I was able to track the bathroom water usage easily. However, I will have to revise my project a little bit. I said I was going to refit the faucets with new aerators and insert water displacement containers in my toilets.

Well, it turns out that every faucet already has a high efficiency aerator and all our toilets are high efficiency as well (1.6 gpf). We even have water-saving shower heads. This shouldn’t change my project too much; I will just have to calculate how much water would be used with the average, non-conserving devices.

One thing that is throwing me off, though, is that since we have our own source of well water, we actually don’t pay a water utilities bill. My original plan was to calculate how much money we would have saved on our water bill, so I will just have to find the average amount people pay a year.

This week, I will be making water conservation awareness posters. I have juggled ideas of making step-by-step posters or just posters that have a straight-up message to conserve water now. I’ve decided on the latter because I believe posters work best when there is less to read. People need to be able to see a sense of urgency with regards to conservation, and thus they will feel the need to act now. I’ve already got some ideas on what these will look like, and it’s just a matter of finding good source images and opening up PhotoShop.