IBM's Smarter Water Management: Can a Faucet Leak 27,000 Gallons Per Year?

A few days ago I posted some infographics that I found at  the Watercache Blog but originated from the 'smarter water management' folks at IBM. 

Here is a PDF of the infographics:  

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The following infographic generated some controversy: 

Friend and alert reader Peter Boddie emailed to let me know that this graphic is grossly misleading. He estimated that there are about 76,000 drops per gallon, so at one drip per second and with 31,557,600 seconds per year yields 415 gallons per year.

A far cry from 27,000 gallons per year!

I thought Peter's figure might be a bit low, so I used the USGS calculator and got about 2,100 gallons per year. The USGS  assumed a larger volume for a drop (0.25 mL) than Peter did, which yields about 15,100 drips per gallon (check this converter).

I got about the same figure as the USGS's doing the calculations by hand.

The IBM website (PDF) says the 27,000 gallons per year is from ASCE. I checked the ASCE WWW site, which states:

A faucet dripping just once per second will waste as much as 2,700 gallons of water per year. 

Looks like the 'smarter water management folks cannot transpose figures correctly.

Upshot: Estimating the water wasted by a leaking faucet is not straightforward unless you actually measure it. But 27,000 gallons per year comes from a HUGE faucet!

Makes me wonder about the validity of the other figures; I have not checked them.

I have informed IBM of this issue.

See Chris Maxwell-Gaines' comment on the original post.

Good lesson for me on checking figures and graphics I use. 

"I like to do great stuff with simple things." - Djeevan Schiferli, IBM Smarter Water Management expert

Comments

[Michael]

Hi, Charles.

Thanks for commenting.

If faucet piping has a hole in it, then the pipe is leaking, not the faucet. That may be nitpicking but we are talking about leaky faucets and most people view that as the spigot itself dripping, not the pipe leaking.

Based on the work others (ASCE, USGS, Peter Boddie) and I have done/reported, 100 gallons per day from a dripping faucet is a real stretch. Impossible? No. Common? I suspect not.

[Charles]

Hi Michael. I was looking into this and what if the faucet piping has a hole that is leaking water? The leak could be greater than 1 drop per second which could make it possible for a faucet to lose 100 gallons in a day. Siemens also states on their site at http://www.water.siemens.com/en/about_us/Pages/Water_Footprint.aspx that "Fix your leaky faucet; left alone it can waste up to 100 gallons of water a day."

[Chris Maxwell-Gaines]

Pretty amazing that a mistake like a misplaced comma can occur in content put out by a large corporation where they should have managers overlooking managers overlooking managers.

[David Zetland]

IBM "solutions" sell better when problems are "bigger."