If you’re looking to save money on your water bill, or just looking for ways to use less water at home, then you may want to think about how much water your faucet uses per minute.
Both faucets and water pressure vary from one home to the next, but you can still calculate water use because water flow rates don’t vary all that much.
For the average household, a faucet uses between 1 to 3 gallons of water per minute, or 4 to 8 liters of water per minute.
The reason that this is such a wide range is because a variety of factors affect faucet water use, including age of the pipes, age of the faucet, and water pressure.
The newer your faucet, the lower the water flow because newer faucets have aerators to reduce water flow.
If you’re not familiar with aerators, they are the mesh screens that you see fitted onto the end of a faucet.
Those mesh screens break the water flow into smaller streams, which effectively reduces the amount of water flowing out of the faucet at the same time.
How To Measure The Water Flow Rate Of Your Faucet
If you want to know how good, or how bad, the flow rate is of your home faucets, then this is something that you can easily check for yourself.
Here’s what you’ll need to measure your faucet flow rate:
- stop watch
- one liter or one gallon container
Now that you have everything that you need, here are the steps to measure your faucet flow rate per minute:
- Open your faucet the maximum amount by turning the water all the way on in the faucet.
- Prepare your stop watch.
- Place the empty container under the flowing faucet and start your stopwatch as the water starts to fill the container.
- Stop the stopwatch as soon as you see that the container is full of water.
- Determine the faucet’s flow rate with the formula Rate=Volume/Time. And then multiply the number you get for Rate by 60 to get the data in minutes.
To give you an example of the Rate=Volume/Time formula in action, let’s assume that you used a 2-liter bottle as your container and it took 15 seconds for the bottle to fill with water from your faucet.
That would be Rate=2/15, which gives us 0.133333. And when we multiply that by 60, we get 8 liters per minute.
How Much Water Does A Shower Use?
If you shower instead of take baths, then you might be curious about your water usage while you stand under that steady stream of water.
Of course, how much water you use in the shower depends on both how long you spend in the shower and the water flow rate.
On average, the average flow rate per minute can look like this:
- 7.5 liters per minute, or 2 gallons per minute
- 12.5 liters per minute, or 3.3 gallons per minute
- 20 liters per minute, or 5.3 gallons per minute
If you just want to estimate this, here’s a quick guide for the average amount of water you use when you shower:
- On average, a 5-minute shower can use 38-100 liters or 10-27 gallons.
- On average, a 10-minute shower can use 75-200 liters or 20-53 gallons.
- On average, a 15-minute shower can use 113-300 liters or 30-80 gallons.
How Much Water Does A Bathtub Faucet Use?
If you like long, hot showers but want to reduce your water usage, then taking a bath is a better option for you.
You can even chose to fill the tub with less water if you’re focused on reducing your water usage.
The average bathtub faucet has a flow rate of 4 to 7 gallons of water per minute, or 15 to 26 liters of water per minute.
Bathtub faucets do not use aerators – in fact, I don’t even think they make them for bathtub faucets.
How much water does the average person use when taking a bath? The average bath uses 30 gallons of water, or 113 liters of water.
How To Reduce The Flow Rate Of Faucets
If you’re interested in reducing the amount of water you use at home, then putting aerators on the faucets in your kitchen and bathrooms is a great way to start.
You can also replace your existing faucets with some designed to reduce water usage.
For your shower, you can replace your shower head with a low-flow showerhead to use less water when you take showers.