We change our Habits to Save Water, now use 43 gallons per day only

An average family of four is reported to use 400 gallons of water per day.  During the last two months, Isa and I successfully lowered our usage to 90 gallons of water per day, or 7 HCF for two months instead of 27 HCF of July and August of last year. 

I wanted to try two months of extreme water savings in case further state-wide cut becomes mandatory. I wanted to identify the minimum of water we would need to use per person per day.  In addition to following the ideas in the "What We Did" section in my earlier post, we also,

• Limit length of shower to 5 minutes.
• Use lightly-soap-ed shower water to water non-vegetable garden, and use the soap-ed shower water to flush toilet.

It takes quite some effort and determination to maintain low water usage, particularly on the transfer of buckets of used water from our 2nd floor bathroom to the front-yard garden.  I am happy to share that our water usage record for now beats the average San Francisco person usage 45.7 gpd.  We may be able to use less, such as taking a shower once every two days.  As a result of these two months experiment, some of my habits have changed.  I become conscious about the length of my shower, the re-use of the lightly-soaped shower water, and how to use water to wash my face or brush my teeth.

California still charges too cheap for water usage for both commercial and residential usage.  Below is our residential water and garbage disposal bill.

Only $3 for 1 HCF or 748 gallons of clean water !  
I can flood my house with 1 HCF

The most effective and easiest way to move Californians to save water is to charge much more for water usage above a certain level, for example, 20 HCF for residential use.  Commercial threshold would be much harder to be identified.  I am not an expert.  But I am hopeful something wise can be done for the commercial use.

Another way to lower water usage is to collect the natural rainwater and able to re-use it for flushing toilet and watering garden.  My next home project is to look into setting up an affordable rainwater collection system.  Current timeline is sometime in the coming Fall of 2015.

Would you want to try to save water?