Texas Trickle vs Turn Off

You might be surprised at how much water you can save with a simple adjustment. Let’s explore a little basic arithmetic:

The average residential sink pours out 2.2 gallons of water per minute. If you leave the water running for two whole minutes while you, say, brush your teeth, that adds up to:

8.8 gallons a day (brushing teeth 2x per day for two minutes each),
over 60 gallons a week, and
over 3,200 gallons a year!

In a single year, just 100 people could fill an entire football field with water a foot deep with all that wasted water. To put it another way, 200 individuals using water at this rate would create enough wasted water to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool within a year.

Most of us are more careful than that, so let’s pretend that you blast the faucet full power for just 30 seconds when you brush. That comes out to:

2.2 gallons per day,
about 15 gallons per week, and
over 800 gallons a year of water just flushed down the drain.

Now let’s apply the Texas Trickle and turn your faucet on only a quarter of the way. Running the water at only one quarter of its maximum flow is really all you need to rinse your toothbrush for a few seconds. That flow rate uses only about half a gallon per minute. If you need all 30 seconds per brush to get the job done, that’s:

just over a half gallon (32 ounces) per day,
3.85 gallons per week, and
200 gallons per year.

Wow! We just went from thoughtlessly wasting over 3,000 gallons of water a year to carefully using just 200 gallons of water a year. That water was moved, cleaned, inspected, and transported to your home through the efforts of thousands of dedicated workers.

Now that you’re thinking about all the great ways you can conserve water, have you taken The Pledge to Take Care of Texas?

Order FREE publications and get some helpful reminders about water conservation like our Mirror Cling, Water ReCycles Poster, and our Every Drop Counts sticker.h

Let us know how your water conservation efforts are going on the Share Your Story page.