How many drips are in a gallon?

One drip, two drip, three drip 4....

Check your faucets around your home — do any of them drip? Well, maybe it’s just a small drip - how much water can little drip waste?  True, a single drip doesn't seem like much of a waste of water, but think about each faucet in your home dripping just a little bit all day long. Now, what if every faucet in every home on your block...in your town...in your state also dripped?  The drips would quickly add up to a flood of water wasted down the drain.

According to expert scientific investigation, collecting drips from an average faucet in a calibrated measuring cylinder, a small drip has a volume of about 1/3 of a milliliter (0.33 ml). So, by many repeat experiments of dripping water into the cylinder, there are about 3,000 drips in a liter of water. A gallon is equal to 3.7854 liters, so, by the math (3,000 times 3.7854), we have about 15,100 drips per gallon from your faucet.

Now just for an example of how much water a dripping faucet or faucets in your home would add up to, let’s say you have 3 faucets that drip 60 drips a minute all day and all night. There are 1,440 minutes in a 24 hour day, (60 minutes times 24 hours = 1,440 minutes).

• 60 drips a minute times 3 faucets = 180 drips a minute.
• 180 drips times 1,440 minutes in a day = 259,200 drips per day.
• 259,200 drips per day divided by 3,000 drips in a liter = 86.4 liters.
• 86.4 liters divided by 3.7854 liters = 22.8 gallons a day.
• 22.8 gallons a day times 30 days in a month = 684 gallons of water a month dripping down your drain and out to waste.

Add to a dripping faucet the "whispering"  leaking toilet.  A toilet will waste from 300 gallons to 1500 gallons of water every day!  Most of the time you cannot hear the water seeping out the flapper valve or down the overflow, but if you remove the lid from the top of your toilet water tank and listen very quietly, you will hear a faint, steady and soft "ssSssSss" sound coming up from the tank shutoff valve inside the tank.  (You can also see the "whispering" water being used if you look at the small indicator dial on your water meter out at the street in the meter box)   Did you know that just a ½ gallon a minute leak is 720 gallons a day! A unit of water on your water meter is 748 gallons or 10 cubic feet!

Listed below are average amounts of water used per person in a home every day.

Bath: 36 Gallons                   

Shower: 2 gallons per minute

Teeth brushing: 1 gallon  

Hands/face washing: 1 gallon 

Face/leg shaving: 1 gallon

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Our phone number for the Water Treatment Facility is : 503-397-1311

The phone number for Public Works is: 503-397-3532