Reduce your use, restore the rest.

Conserving water is just the beginning. It's also important to calculate how much water you are actually using. That way, you'll know how big your water footprint is and how you can balance it. Wanna crunch your numbers? Calculate your water use here.

Shower (17% of indoor residential water use)

You can use 6% (183 gallons/year) less water for your showers if you replace a standard shower head (2.5 gallons/minute) with n ultra-low flow shower head (1.6 gallons/minute) or 41% (2,008 gallons/year) if you're still using an older (4 gallons/minute) shower head.

Water Bottles

When including the water it takes to produce the plastic bottles, it takes 3 gallons of water to produce a 1 gallon of bottled water. If every American switched to tap water, more than 9 billions gallons of water would be saved. source

Laundry Machine (22% of indoor residential water use)

Replacing a standard washer (39 gallons/load) with a high efficiency front loading washer (15 gallons/load) will reduce the average household's laundry water use by 62% and your personal water footprint by 3,272 gallons per year.

Outdoor

Watering your plants and shrubs with a drip system is 20% more efficient than watering with above-ground oscillating or rotating-head sprinklers. source

Faucets (16% of indoor residential water use)

Installing low flow faucet aerators (1.5 gallons/minute) can save more than 2,000 gallons per person each year (40%)

 
Data sourced from Handbook of Water Use and Conservation, Amy Vickers, WaterPlow Press, 2001
+ DATA SOURCES