Part 1-A:
I am from State College, Pennsylvania. The town’s water supply comes from the State College Borough Water Authority. The water is stored in two well fields, Houserville and Big Hollow, which all together contain 9 wells and the system uses about 5.5 million gallons of water per day. The water is treated at a Roberts contact clarification filter plant and the water is treated with chlorine for disinfection. After the water is collected and has gone through the filtration system, the water is delivered to the distribution system, which stores 15 million gallons in 11 tanks. These tanks lead to pipes that distribute the water to the households in the area. Once the water has been used and has gone down the drain, it is sent to a water waste treatment plant.
1-b. Activity:
Brushing Teeth(x2): 2 gallons
Showering: 40 gallons
Washing hands and face: 10 gallons
Drinking water: (16.9 oz): .5 gallons
Flushing Toilet(x4): 10 gallons
Dishes: 20 gallons
Total: 82.5 gallons
Part C:
Considering that I use about 82.5 gallons of water everyday, I could not imagine only using 2 gallons per day. This would be an extremely difficult change to adjust to. I would definitely use my water to drink as much as I would need to in order to survive. In addition, it would be very difficult to only use about 1 gallon to shower, but I would try to keep myself as clean as possible. It would not be very difficult for me to give up water when it comes to cooking because I do not use water while cooking very often. I could also give up using water for dishes and start using paper plates instead. I would use my water mainly for hydration and cleanliness. Geography is an extremely important factor when it comes to water supply because in some areas in the world there is a limited amount of water and people cannot live their everyday lives without worrying about how much water they use. I am very thankful that I live in an area with enough water to supply for my everyday needs.
Hi Chole!
My name is Jacqueline and here’s a link to my blog!
https://wp.me/p3RCAy-btV
Our water supply for our homes is extremely similar and we both used around the same amount of water on a daily basis. For my experiment I used paper plates and plastic utensils to cut down on washing dishes and saved me a significant amount of water! I cannot imagine only having 2 gallons of water available each day especially with how much we use now. We definitely are extremely lucky to be able to not have to worry about stretching 2 gallons of water over a 24 hour period but we as a community should try and figure out ways that we can all cut down on our usage.
Hi Chloe! My name is Peter Han and my intended major is Mechanical Engineering. You used about 20 gallons more than I do and that mostly came from washing dishes as I do not have to do that as I live in a dorm on campus. I was able to use only 2 gallons of water as I went a whole day without really cleaning myself and agree that we should be very thankful that we live in an area with plenty of water. It is a very hard adjustment especially since showers take about 50 gallons just for 10 minutes and you’d need to try to reduce it down to 1.
Here is a link to my blog: http://geog030.dutton.psu.edu/2016/02/10/peter-han-module-4/
– Peter
Hey Chloe, I noticed that we both used about the same amount of water in our part B. I was wondering if you calculated your own water usage, of if you plugged your numbers into one of the water usage calculators? The first time I tried to calculate my water usage using the USGS calculator and it had my water usage at nearly 150 gallons. I was somewhat shocked by these numbers, so I decided to calculate my water usage on my own. The second time it cam out to roughly 90 gallons of water, and while this was higher than I had anticipated, it was a huge difference from 150 gallons. Feel free to check out my results!
http://geog030.dutton.psu.edu/2016/02/10/jared-mummert-water-usage/
Hey Chloe! I’m Christi 🙂 Your post caught my attention because I really liked your idea of using paper plates to cut down on dish washing. At first this seemed like a great idea because being the plates are paper you would think you could recycle them. However after doing some research it seems as though the majority of paper plates cannot be recycled because they are low paper, bleached, or have a wax coating. This would somewhat be a trade off because we would be conserving water but would be increasing waste/garbage. Maybe in the future we can develop a larger variety of paper plates that can actually be recycled and conserve water and recycle! Here is a link to my blog if you want to check it out:http://geog030.dutton.psu.edu/2016/02/10/water-usage-3/