Part a) I live in a rural part of York, Pa, and our water comes from a well. York is *well* known for having large amounts of aquifers that contain groundwater. I just realized this while writing the blog, but about half of the school districts or towns in my  area have the word “spring” in their name; i.e. Admire Springs, Bermudian Springs, York Springs, Spring Grove, etc. This leads me to believe that there is no shortage of groundwater in my area. Our well depth is around 80-90 feet which is very shallow considering the average well depth in Pa is closer to 150 feet. The water from the aquifer is pumped up using a well pump, and then treated in our basement using UV light and a variety of filters. After being used, our waste-water enters our septic system. The high water table in our area forced us to install an elevated sand-mound type septic system. This helps ensure that the water is as clean as possible, and that sewage doesn’t leach into our well water.

Part b) For this part I measured the time that it took to fill a 2.5 gallon bucket or a 1 gallon jug, and then converted it to gallons per minute for my bathroom sink, kitchen sink, and shower. For the dishwaser, toilet, and laundry machine I read the gallons per use that was labeled on each device.

Shower: 1 shower * 7 mins * 4.1 gal/min = 28.7 gallons

Toilets: 5 flushes * 1.6 gal/flush = 8 gallons

Washing Hands: 7 hand washes * .5 mins * 1 gal/min = 3.5 gallons

Laundry: 1 load * 25 gal/load = 25 gallons

Dishwasher: 1 load * 5 gal/load = 5 gallons

Dishes by Hand: 3 washes *  mins/wash * 2 gal/min = 18 gallons

Brushing Teeth: 3 brushes = < 1 gallon

Drinking Water: < 1 gallon

TOTAL = 90.2 gallons!!!

Part C) As you can see, I used roughly 90 gallons of water in one day alone! If I were forced to live on 2 gallons of water for one day I would have to make some significant changes. I would start by cutting out the laundry and dishes, because these aren’t necessities. Just by not doing these two things for one day I would save nearly 48 gallons of water, and more than halve my daily water use! I would also have to load up on cologne, and not take a shower for the day because this is another huge use of water. The hardest thing to cut back on would be the toilet flushes (insert emoji with surgical mask). Just one flush alone would use up over three quarters of my daily two gallon limit! Essentially I would pretty much have to cut out everything other than drinking water and one toilet flush. I could use hand sanitizer in place of hand washing, and could hopefully get away with .4 gallons of drinking water. Of course this is all just a nice thought because on the day that I was going to attempt this I didn’t even make it past breakfast. I woke up and used the restroom and then washed my hands, and just like that I used up nearly all of my two gallons. I didn’t take a shower on this day, but I did drink about half a gallon of water, and the pile of dishes in the sink forced me to wash them. It was much harder than I had anticipated. I definitely cut back on my water use from part b), but I still wasn’t able to accomplish my goal. Geography definitely plays a huge part in water use. We are lucky to live in an area where water isn’t an overly scarce resource, but with the U.S. leading the country in water use  per capita it would certainly be a bad idea to cut back.