How much water does a leaking faucet waste?
Check your faucets at home — do any of them drip? Well, maybe it’s just a small drip — how much water can a little drip waste? True, a single drip won’t waste much water. But think about each faucet in your home dripping a little bit all day long. What if every faucet in every home on your block … in your town … in your state also dripped? The drips would add up to a flood of water wasted down the drain. There is no scientific definition of the volume of a faucet drip, but after measuring a number of kitchen and bathroom sink faucets, the volume seems to be between 1/5th and 1/3rd of a milliliter (mL). Drips from bathroom tubs come in a bit more, though, at about 1/2 mL. So, for our calculations below (numbers are rounded), we are going to use 1/4 mL as the volume of a faucet drip. So, by these drip estimates: • One gallon: 15,140 drips • One liter: 4,000 drips Looking at it this way, it seems like that drop of water down the drain is pretty insignificant. But, as you can see by
