How much water is wasted through a dripping faucet

(Photo by MJ/FreeRangestock.com)

My kitchen faucet has had a slow drip for months, but because my husband and I were worried about the cost of getting it fixed, we kept putting off calling a plumber. You know how it goes: You think to yourself, "I'll take care of it as soon as I can
But one day last week, our backyard faucet started dripping, too, and we felt we couldn't ignore the problem anymore. My husband made an appointment to get both faucets fixed, and now, for the first time in about half a year, we can sit in our living room without listening to the drip, drip, drip coming from the kitchen.

The repair was recent enough that we have no idea if it will make a difference in the amount of water we use every month, but I've heard that even a slow drip can really add up. I found a calculator on the U.S. Geological Survey website that can tell you how much water is wasted by a dripping faucet. All you have to do is plug in how often the faucet drips.

Had I found the calculator before we got our faucets fixed, I could've timed our kitchen drips to see how many we had per minute, plug the number in and I would know how much clean water my husband and I had been letting go right down the drain.

And maybe, just maybe, if I had found the calculator sooner, knowing how much water we were wasting would've prompted us to get it fixed a lot sooner.

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