How much water is per month?

Answer 1

This is a very involved question that I started trying to answer for myself just last year when I installed a set of rain barrels in my backyard.

The short answer is it depends on how much rain falls in your area and how much storage you setup to save the rainwater. You would be surprised at how much rainwater you can collect from your roof if only 1" of rain falls on it. If your house is only 900sqft and you can collect all the rain that falls on half of your roof (450sqft) after 1" of rain falls you would have (450sqft x 1/12ft) 37.5 cu feet of water or (37.5 cu feet * 7.48 cu feet/gal) over 280 gallons of water! Its important to note that 280 gallons of water weighs a lot (280 gallons X 8.34 lbs /gal = 2,335 lbs) so make sure that you have the proper supports for whatever you decide to keep the rainwater in.

If you really want to know how much water you can expect to catch then you need to know

1) How much rain typically falls in your area.

2) The area of your collection surface (roof).

To find out how much rain typically falls in your area you can visit the following website (its in spanish, I haven't found one that's free and in English) and put in your location. All the airports around collect this information so you'll have to find one nearest your house. Also you could buy a simple rain gauge and collect data over some time to get the average rain fall. Look at the column parked PP, its in mm which there are 25.4 mm per inch.

http://www.tutiempo.net/clima/Fort_Worth_Meacham_International_Airport/12-2007/722596.htm

To find the area of your roof you'll need a tape measure and a ladder (depending on your roof height) unless you have a blueprint. Get up there and measure length and width of your roof. Generally roofs aren't perfect rectangles so you may need to break it into triangles and rectangles. To find the area of a rectangle, if you remember from geometry class, is just length x width. For a triangle its just 1/2 length X width. If you aren't up to climbing on the roof then just make an estimate of the area by look at your roof from the street and dividing up the sq feet of your house by what percentage your collection area is of your whole roof. ( I know this doesn't account for the pitch of your roof)

If you're mathematically inclined then the procedure mentioned above will be pretty easy for you. If not don't worry just buy a rain gauge and hang it up somewhere in your yard where it is clear of the canopy of any trees or overhangs. Wait until your first rain storm and see how much water you collect. You could then work out the area by dividing the gallons collected expressed as cubic feet (gallons/ 7.48 cubic feet / gallon) by the inches of rain expressed in feet (inches/12) and get the area in square feet. Of course this only works if you can collect every drop that falls off the roof without your bucket overflowing. (Maybe you could go outside and watch the barrel until it fills up and then look at the rain gauge to see how many inches have fallen. Nah that'd be silly.)

So, what could you do with all this rain that you've collected ? Well if you have a garden you could use it to water your garden. Why would you want to use rainwater when its so cheap to use water from the city? Well if you believe the environmentalists we're running out of fresh water and depending on where you live its not so easy to get water from the city cheaply ask someone from Australia how cheap water is! Or ask someone in Tenessee when they have to drive to the nearest town to get thieir daily water ration how cheap fresh water is. Anyway even if you do get cheap water from the city it takes pumps to pump the water to your house and that takes energy which usually comes from coal fired power plants which emit terrible toxins into the air.

In summary you will never know how much rainwater you can collect from your roof until you try it yourself or do some calculations. There are tons of resources on the web on how to make rain barrels and you can get free barrels from your local car wash! There are free plans to download from the web on how to make rain barrels too!

Answer 2

an average person can use up to 80 gallons of water a day, that is alot so save, unless you want to pay the water bill

I would say that is a LOT. The average shower take about 8.5 gallons of water. The average toilet flush is about 3.5 gallons. The average person will flush the toilet about 5 times per day or 17.5 gallons. The average dishwasher uses about 30 gallons of water per day. The average clothes washer uses about 5 gallons per load, or 10 gallons per week, or 1.3 gallons per day. The average person drinks about 20 ounces of water a day, or about 1/4 gallon. The average amount of water used per person to cook is about 1 gallon per day. Add these all up and you get about 44 gallons per day.

(dishwasher total is for two people) so average of 15 gallons per day per person.)

Answer 3

Its $2.50 per month.