And water is even less elastic than electricity. Municipal pipe leaks in your neighborhood will have a bigger impact on your street’s water consumption rate than any amount of conservation or efficiency within the home.
Civil engineer who works with municipalities on repairing pipe infrastrucure. I’m in Canada, so YMMV, but they’re ON it with leaking pipes. We’re typically brought in to design new watermains when the old ones reach ~5-10% leakage.
If you don’t like anecdotal evidence, here’s a paper from 2000- This was at the start of when municipalities began examining for this, and even then they only found losses of 20-30%. A personal reduction of 20-30% isn’t that hard.
Civil engineer who works with municipalities on repairing pipe infrastrucure. I’m in Canada, so YMMV, but they’re ON it with leaking pipes. We’re typically brought in to design new watermains when the old ones reach ~5-10% leakage.
If you don’t like anecdotal evidence, here’s a paper from 2000- This was at the start of when municipalities began examining for this, and even then they only found losses of 20-30%. A personal reduction of 20-30% isn’t that hard.
https://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2008/nrc-cnrc/NR25-2-40E.pdf