Science Report 05/10/2013 Shannon O Shea Water Usage Science Report for 5/9/2013 (9:00pm) to 5/10/2013 (6:00pm) By Shannon O=E2=80=99Shea Crew 130 is still using more water than we would like to. We there= fore decided to record what purposes water was specifically being used for in addition to how much= total water we were using in order to try to determine where we were using the most water. Thi= s will allow us to try to further reduce our water usage. We also wanted to determine if the water m= eter was accurately recording water being used and what way of flushing the toilet used the lea= st water since there are two ways it can be flushed. Our results are as follows. We started our test by checking the accuracy of the water meter in = order to determine if it was accurately recording how much water was being used. We tested this by = measuring out water in a graduated cylinder and comparing this measurement to the water meter=E2=80= =99s reading to check the accuracy. Our findings were that for an actual amount of water in the grad= uated cylinder of 0.27 gallons the water meter measured a change of 0.32 gallons. This is a perce= nt error in the measurement of approximately 18.5%. The meter is reading high. In other w= ords, our reported water usage is higher than the amount of water we are actually using. This would= indicate that there are either some unidentified losses in the system or that the water meter needs= to be re-calibrated. In either case, this is a pretty large percent error in the measurement of wat= er being used that should be kept in mind when reviewing reports. The rest of the measurements were = all taken using measurements from the water meter for consistency. Water was used for a number of different sources throughout the day= . The total water used according to the water meter, for the day was 22.77 Gallons. The total wat= er used for drinking water for the crew was 3.46 gallons or 15% of total water. The total water= used for cooking was 0.67gallons or 3% of total water. It should be noted that we did less cook= ing today than usual since we had leftovers. The total water used for cleaning dishes was 2.82 = gallons or 12% of total. The total water used for watering plants in the green hab was 1.28 gallons= or 6% of total. Today was unusual in that it was the first day the crew took any sh= owers and half of the crew took brief showers today. The total water used for showers and brushi= ng teeth and face washing was 4.51 gallons or 20% of total usage.=20 The last category of water usage was flushing the toilet for solid = waste. We flushed the toilet a total of 5 times or in other words less than once per person yet i= t used the largest amount of water at a total of 9.98 gallons or 44% of our total water usage for the= day. We also split up the usage by flushing 2 times with the green button and 3 times with the si= lver button. While this was a small sample we did see that on average the silver button used 1.84 g= allons per flush and the green button used 2.23 gallons per flush. This was surprising because acco= rding to the manual for the toilet the green should be only using 0.5 gallons and the silver should= be using 1 gallon but this is not what we have found. The largest source of water consumption is= currently the toilet even with very limited usage. We plan to continue this study for another d= ay to record more data and see if the current usage trends hold. Best regards, Shannon O'Shea