How Americans use their water supply

Toilets #1. Awesome.

Please fix those leaks! Save some money! Save our valuable resource and reduce your carbon footprint

Your an idiot. 90% of the consumed in the US is used by industry not consumers.

that doesn't mean that you can't make a difference. 100% of the consumption is from people.

So this is graph of how domestic (residential) water is used. So I'm confused: the graph says toilets use 26.7% of the water, but if you hover over toilets, it says percentage of Total Daily Use is 18.5%. Why the difference?

The difference is the the data is actually in gallons per capita, the the 18.5 in the hover over is gallons, not a percentage, whereas the 26.7 is the percentage of total indoor water usage.

The leaks primarily come from the water delivery system UP TO your home. I worked for the largest US manufacturer of water products and can tell you the larger the city, the worse the leak rates are. The worst city loses about 50% of the water they process to leaks (mostly equipment that is more than 50 years old and deteriorating).

In the typical single family home more water goes toward outdoor uses rather than indoor uses -- only indoor use is broken down here. However, outdoor use (watering landscaping) varies geographically due to climate. Hot and dry Phoenix, Tempe and Scottsdale, AZ use 59-67% of residential total on outdoor use, while cool and wet Seattle, Tampa, and Waterloo, Ontario use 22-38% on outdoor use. Indoor use varies due to the age of plumbing fixtures. For example, per capita indoor use in Seattle is 83.5 gallons, while Eugene, OR weighs in at 57.1 gallons.

In reply to the first post, toilets don’t have to be #1. But in modern conserving homes toilets drop to 4th place. In many places you can cheaply trade inefficient toilets for your choice of better, more efficient models through a municipal toilet rebate. In case you were wondering, the average is 5.05 flushes at home per person per day.

It turns out that the 13.7% leakage comes from only 5-10% of the 1188 homes in the study. Those leaks are within the home itself -- this study was a residential study with no analysis of the efficiency of delivery from the treatment plant to your water meter. With respect to the previous post, it is rumored that Philadelphia loses 40% of treated water through leaky infrastructure.

This data was collected 1997 – 1999.
http://aquacraft.com/Public...

Matt is absolutely right. I put the data into Swivel from the link that he provided in the comment: you can see the comparison of outdoor to indoor here: http://swivel.com/graphs/sh...