“Splish-splash, I was taking a bath…”

Every drop counts!

The average Australian uses 115 kilolitres (kL) of water in a year. That works out to be 315 litres of water a day. Between half and three-quarters of this is used in the bathroom alone.

Do you think you don’t use that much water? Here’s some quick facts.

• If you were to let the water run for two minutes while you’re brushing your teeth, about 12 to 17 litres of water would have gurgled down the sink.
• A running tap releases about four cups (one litre) of water every ten seconds.
• New toilets use about six to eight litres of water with every full flush. They use about three litres with every half flush. Old toilets may use up to 20 litres when flushing.
• If you have quicker showers (about eight minutes on average), you can use 120 litres or more of water with a regular showerhead. By using a water-efficient low flow showerhead this can be cut to 60 litres or less.
• When having a bath, depending on how light you are, how big your tub is, and how often you top up the hot water, you could use between 70 to 160 litres of water each time.
• Leaking taps, showerheads and toilets can easily waste an estimated 16,000 litres of water a year.

You can help to save water by doing the following things

• Turn off the tap when you clean your teeth,
• Instead of letting the tap run when gargling, fill a cup with water and gargle from it. That way, you’ll only use a cupful of water each time.
• Identify leaky toilets by putting food colouring in your toilet tank. If the colour shows up in the bowl without the toilet being flushed, then you know your toilet is leaking and needs to be fixed.
• If you like really long showers, try reducing the length by five minutes to save up to 100 litres of water.
• While in the shower, turn the water off while you lather. Try combining several activities such as washing your hair, or shaving if you’re old and hairy enough!
• If you like taking baths, take a smaller one. For an idea of how much water you use in your bath each time, try this experiment .
• If you have a dual flush cistern, try using the half flushes as much as possible.