Did you know that an American home can waste, on average, 11,000 gallons of water every year due to running toilets, dripping faucets, and other household leaks?

The Facts on Leaks:

• Leaks can account for, on average, 11,000 gallons of water wasted in the home every year, which is enough to fill a backyard swimming pool.

• The amount of water leaked from U.S. homes could exceed more than 1 trillion gallons per year. That's equivalent to the annual water use of Los Angeles, Chicago, and Miami combined.

• Fixing easily corrected household water leaks can save homeowners more than 10 percent on their water bills.  If you don’t feel you’re up to it, call someone like us to do it for you.

Here are a few water-saving tips for inside the home:

• Reduce faucet leaks by checking faucet washers and gaskets for wear and, if necessary, replace the faucet with a water saving model.

• Leaky toilets are most often the result of a worn toilet flapper. Replacing the rubber flapper is a quick fix that could save a home up to 200 gallons of water per day.

• A leaky faucet that drips at the rate of one drip per second can waste more than 3,000 gallons per year. A home with a low flush toilet could use that water to flush for six months!

• Leaky faucets can be reduced by checking faucet washers and gaskets for wear and replacing them if necessary. If you are replacing a faucet, look for the Water Sense label.  Write the date you checked your faucets down and make sure you do it again within frequent intervals.

• A showerhead leaking at 10 drips per minute wastes more than 500 gallons per year. That's enough water to wash 60 loads of dishes in your dishwasher.

• Most leaky showerheads can be fixed by ensuring a tight connection using pipe tape and a wrench.

Leak Detection:

• A good method to check for leaks is to examine your winter water usage. It’s likely that a family of four has a serious leak problem if its winter water use exceeds 12,000 gallons per month.

• One way to find out if you have a toilet leak is to place a drop of food coloring in the toilet tank. If the color shows up in the bowl without flushing, you have a leak. Make sure to flush immediately after this experiment to avoid staining the tank.

• If your toilet is leaking, the cause is most often an old, faulty toilet flapper. Over time, this inexpensive rubber part decays, or minerals build up on it. It's usually best to replace the whole rubber flapper—a relatively easy, inexpensive do-it-yourself project that pays for itself in no time.

• If your toilet is running constantly, you could be wasting 200 gallons of water or more every day.

• If you do need to replace the entire toilet, look for a low flow labeled model. If a family of four replaces its older, inefficient toilets with new low flow labeled ones, it could save more than 16,000 gallons per year. Retrofitting the house could save the family approximately $2,000 in water and wastewater bills over the lifetime of the toilets.

Here are a few water-saving tips for outside the home:

• A sprinkler system should be checked each spring before use to make sure it was not damaged by frost or freezing.  Also make sure that the positioning of your system isn’t needlessly watering sidewalks or driveways.  

• An irrigation system with pressure set at 60 pounds per square inch that has a leak 1/32nd of an inch in diameter (about the thickness of a dime) can waste about 6,300 gallons of water per month.

• Check your garden hose for leaks at its connection to the spigot. If it leaks while you run your hose, replace the nylon or rubber hose washer and ensure a tight connection to the spigot using pipe tape and a wrench.  (to read more about water conservation see that article in our archives)

• For a leaky garden hose, replace the nylon or rubber hose washer and ensure a tight connection to the spigot using pipe tape and a wrench.  Landscape irrigation systems should be checked each spring before use to make sure they are not damaged by frost or freezing.

Facts and Statistics:

• Approximately 5 to 10 percent of American homes have water leaks that drip away 90 gallons a day or more! Many of these leaks reside in old fixtures such as leaky toilets and faucets. In fact, water lost by these leaky residences could be reduced by more than 30,000 gallons if new, efficient fixtures were installed. If the 5 percent of American homes that leak the most corrected those leaks—it could save more than 177 billion gallons of water annually!

• If all inefficient toilets in U.S. homes were converted to Low flow labeled models, we could save more than 640 billion gallons of water per year—the equivalent to 15 days of flow over Niagara Falls.

Leaky toilet flappers, faucets, and other valves are easy to fix and usually require only a few tools and hardware. If you cannot do these things on your own, we would be happy to come out and have a look for you.