Tag: Peabody

My Morning Shower Uses 22.4 Gallons: Comparing Water Usage of My Water-Using Activities to Reduce My Water Use During Our Massachusetts Drought

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Ten of the 14 counties of Massachusetts are currently in a Level 3 drought, Critical Drought—including Suffolk County, which contains Boston; Middlesex County, which contains Cambridge and Somerville; and Essex County, which contains Salem. This is a ban on all non-essential outdoor water use (not including our vegetable garden).

Drought map from mass.gov.

This past month watering has sometimes felt kind of futile. I’d water and then less than an hour water the soil would be dry like I hadn’t watered at all, or our housemate PJ would water and I’d come outside and think she hadn’t watered because the soil was already dry.

Given that we are in a drought, and that I’m not really sure what Level 4 is going to look like, I got curious about how much water my various daily water-using activities take up.

Normal Shower

On Sunday I took a shower like I normally do, except this time with the drain plugged, with the water on while I:

  1. apply shampoo
  2. rinse off shampoo
  3. apply conditioner
  4. soap legs and shave
  5. rinse off
  6. brush my teeth
  7. rinse off conditioner
  8. soap everything
  9. rinse off

This shower took 16 minutes and 20 seconds.

At the end of the shower the tub was full to 13.7 cm depth in the middle or 13.4 cm depth one-third of the tub in from each side. I’m going to assume the average depth was about 13.4 cm. The sides of the tub are sloped, but halfway up the depth of the water, at 6.7 cm depth, the tub is 50.8 cm wide and 124.5 cm long. The volume of water, then, was 13.4 cm × 50.8 cm × 124.5 cm = 84,700 cm³, or 22.4 gallons.

(I also timed how long it takes our shower to fill two cups. It took 6 seconds to fill 2 cups, or 48 seconds to fill a gallon, which means 16 minutes and 20 seconds used 20.4 gallons of water. I’d say the two estimates are close enough.)

Water-Saving Shower

On Monday I took a water-saving version of my usual shower, which went like this:

  1. turn on shower, get moist, and turn off shower
  2. apply shampoo
  3. turn on shower, rinse off shampoo, and turn off shower
  4. apply conditioner
  5. soap legs and shave
  6. brush my teeth
  7. turn on shower, rinse off conditioner, and turn off shower
  8. soap everything
  9. turn on shower, rinse off, and turn off shower

Still the same number of steps, just colder and creepily quiet.

This shower took 12 minutes and 36 seconds total, including both water-off times and water-on times. At the end of it the tub was full to 5.4 cm depth in the middle or 5.1 cm depth one-third of the tub in from each side. Halfway up the depth of the water, at 2.6 cm depth, the tub is 48.3 cm wide and 120.7 cm long. The volume of water, then, was 5.1 cm × 48.3 cm × 120.7 cm = 29,700 cm³, or 7.9 gallons.

Only having the water on to rinse off, in other words, uses 35.3% of the water used by my normal shower.

Bath

I started taking baths only recently, when a collaborator and friend said they’d started taking baths during the pandemic to disconnect from the world and I decided I wanted to try it. I take a bath once or twice a month, especially in challenging months, though sometimes I miss months, presumably because they aren’t challenging months. Highly recommend, especially with a nice book.

When I take a bath I fill the tub up most of the way—about 25.0 cm depth. Halfway up the depth of the water, at 12.5 cm depth, the tub is 52.1 cm wide and 127.0 cm long. The volume of water, then, is 25.0 cm × 52.1 cm × 127.0 cm = 165,400 cm³, or 43.7 gallons.

Taking a bath, in other words, uses about twice the water used by my normal shower, or about 5.5 times as much water as a water-saving version of my normal shower.

Watering the Vegetable Garden

Next I measured how much water I use when watering our vegetable garden. I timed that it takes on average 2.384 seconds (average of five samples: 2.38, 2.60, 2.50, 2.26, and 2.18) to fill two cups—or 19.1 seconds to fill a gallon—using our water hose at the setting I use, coincidentally called the shower setting. I then timed myself watering the plants, pausing the timer whenever I paused the plant-watering. It took me five minutes and 26 seconds to water the plants, or 17.1 gallons.

Running the Dishwasher

I run our dishwasher once a day on Normal Energy Saving mode, which apparently uses anywhere from 2.4 to 6.8 gallons of water.

Back when we lived in Cambridge we had a tiny countertop dishwasher (referral link, which means I make a small amount of money if you click and buy something) I ran once a day for the two of us. At some point our kitchen sink wasn’t draining so I unhooked the output house and left it in our tiny under-sink recycling bin. A full dishwasher run filled at most a fourth of the tiny four-or-five-gallon under-sink recycling bin with dirty water, or at most 1.3 gallons.

Handwashing dishes, at least the way I do it, uses substantially more water than a dishwasher. I used to pre-rinse dishes before loading them into the dishwasher and that was dumb and I didn’t realize it was dumb until my parents pointed out to me that it was dumb. Modern dishwashers have gotten good enough that they wash the dishes quite well on their own, and even if they don’t it’s still better to just wash any still-dirty dishes with the next load. Some modern dishwashers apparently even have a garbage disposal.

Washing the Laundry

I run our high-efficiency front-load washing machine on normal or, usually, normal with extra rinse. I couldn’t find actual water usage online and wasn’t willing to spend much time looking but it looks like a similar washing machine uses 11.9-13.9 gallons. I think I run the laundry machine on average 1.5 times a week, so that averages out to 2.6-3.0 gallons a day.

Flushing the Toilet

Our toilets are water-saving toilets with two flush modes, one that uses 1.6 gallons and one that uses 1.1 gallons.

Apparently older toilets from the 1980s through 1992 used 3.5 gallons per flush, and earlier toilets used 5.0-8.0 or more gallons per flush. The average American apparently flushes the toilet five times a day, so the difference between an old toilet and a new toilet adds up.

Washing My Hands

I timed myself washing my hands: 16 seconds. Running the sink for eight seconds filled two cups of water, so washing my hands uses four cups of water, or one-fourth of a gallon.

Drinking

Apparently an adequate daily water intake is 11.5 cups (0.7 gallons) for women or 15.5 cups (1 gallon) for men. I assume I drink less than that.

Conclusions

Here’s the final accounting.

Bathing options:

  • taking a water-saving shower: 7.9 gallons/person/day
  • taking a normal shower: 22.4 gallons/person/day
  • taking a bath: 43.7 gallons/person/day

Going to the bathroom:

  • flushing a water-saving toilet: 1.1-1.6 gallons, or maybe 5.5-8.0 gallons/person/day
  • flushing a 1980s-1992 toilet: 3.5 gallons, or maybe 17.5 gallons/person/day
  • flushing a really old toilet: 5.0-8.0+ gallons, or maybe 25.0-40.0+ gallons/person/day
  • washing my hands: 0.3 gallons, or maybe 1.5 gallons/person/day

Dishes and clothes:

  • running the dishwasher: 2.4-6.8 gallons, or 0.8-2.3 gallons/person/day
  • running the laundry machine: 11.9-13.9 gallons, or 1.3-1.5 gallons/person/day

Sustaining life:

  • drinking: 0.7-1 gallons/person/day
  • watering the vegetable garden: 17.1 gallons, or 5.7 gallons/person/day

My personal total daily water usage ends up at 42.4 gallons per day, 22.4 of those gallons being my showers:

I am needless to say absolutely horrified by my water usage. I’m surprised by just how much water my daily showers use relative to the rest of my water-using activities, and how much a small (to me) change to my shower habits improves my overall water usage—me switching to water-saving showers should save about 5,300 gallons a year, which is enough to fill a 15-foot-diameter backyard swimming pool. I’m also stunned by how much water our water-saving toilets save. The dishwasher and laundry machine use more water than I expected, but when that water is divided by the number of people and frequency of use they use less water than I expected. Once the water use from showering is decreased, watering vegetables and flushing the toilet become close contenders, which also surprises me—but that means those are the areas to focus further improvement.

PJ and Cory set up a giant 55- or 60-gallon rain barrel that collects the water that runs down the gutters from the roof. The rain barrel has so far vacillated between no use for weeks to overflowing in a few days, because that is about what the weather is. We also collect about two gallons of water a day from the basement dehumidifier. Both of these sources we use to water plants, so they offset our water usage a little bit.

Some easy ways I am going to try to use less water without altering my lifestyle:

  1. I’m very happy with the water-saving version of my shower, especially now that I am also occasionally taking baths and I should offset the baths somehow. The water-saving version allows for less standing around in the flowing water, but I listen to music (this is my shower speaker—referral link so if you click and buy I get a small percentage) while I shower anyway so maybe that’s okay. When it’s not so hot I sometimes switch from daily shampoo and conditioner to shampoo and conditioner once every two days, so that will also help. I also have been considering trying sugar waxing instead of shaving to save shower time (not actually for the water but because I’m lazy), so that will also help a little.
  2. It should also be very easy to decrease water usage from hand washing just by running the water less intensely; I could probably use half the water without noticing much difference.
  3. Right now I am the kind of person who wears clothes once and then washes them even if they are still clean. I am going to start wearing pants and skirts at least twice before declaring that they are dirty. I’m also going to buy more of our rate-limiting clothes, which is bras for me and work shirts for Cory, so that we can stretch the time between laundry-doings a tiny bit. Not just water saving—again, I am lazy.
  4. Kind of tempted to not flush pee when I’m working from home alone. Kind of. We’ll see how committed I end up being to this endeavor.
  5. Our housemate/friend/landlady PJ is thinking about getting a second rain barrel, which will shift more of our vegetable garden watering to rainwater (when we get rainwater).
  6. We are also thinking about switching our vegetable garden watering to drip irrigation, which should use less water—but that’s a lot of work and who knows if we’ll get to it.

Luckily the biggest changes are not hard to make. I’m glad I measured.

All the Cods We Saw at Cod Fest/Fireworks Over Peabody/Houses Older Than America

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This 4th of July we spent the day at the Marblehead Festival of Cod, as well as the rest of the also very excellent but admittedly less cod-related Marblehead Festival of Arts. In the Festival of Cod, regional artists decorate wooden codfishes, the decorated codfishes are displayed in storefront windows in Marblehead, whoever wants to bids on the codfishes in an auction online, and the money from the auction goes to future Marblehead Festival of Arts programs and scholarships.

We approached the experience like an unguided scavenger hunt—we ambled around more or less downtown in Marblehead and ran up to look into storefronts when we saw cods in the windows. We got to see a few lovely ocean-focused art galleries and of course the arts festival itself, where we bought a few really lovely ocean-themed wood pieces I continue to feel guiltily and happily covetous of. The cod auction was less pricey than I expected; next year maybe I will bid on a few.

Here are the cods we found, in their natural storefront habitats.

“Marblehead Regatta” by Paula Cardarelli, oil on wood:

“Garden Cod” by Katie Appleton, mixed media collage:

“Sunset Sail” by Elaine Caliri Daly, acrylic:

“Fish Form Meets Function” by Kim Leventhal, paper:

“Beta Virginus, the Second Brightest Star” by Eleanor Fisher, glass shard objet d’art:

“Ms. Cod” by Dayle Persons, altered art, decoupage, mixed media:

“Joyful Journey” by Monica Benton, decoupage with Giclee archival printed material, gold paint, jeweled eye:

“This Cod Came to Party” by Kent Stetson, digital paint, vinyl, crystal—which I was delighted to see had a matching dress next to it in the shop window:

“Caribbean Cod” by Lisa Durkee, epoxy resin with metallic pigment and beach sand:

“Banks Cod” by Bill Frost, pine:

“Abstract Gadus morhua in motion” by Jess Russell, encaustic wax, mineral-based pigment, pan pastels, and shellac on pine:

“Waterfront View 2022” by Marua O’Connor, acrylic ink:

“Old Marblehead” by Polly Maxon Tritschler, acrylic:

“Mouth of Marblehead Marsh” by Jodi Shea, oil on wood:

“There is a Cod Out There” by Ruth Rooks, watercolor/gouache (protected with acrylic spray):

“Little Harbor Cod” by Ellie Tomlinson, acrylic paint on wood:

“Dottie” by Mary Taddie, mixed media:

“Bluefin Red Boat” by Tracy Finn, acrylic on wood:

“Bubbles Below” by Ellen Garvey, blown and fused glass:

“Once Upon a Time in Marblehead” by Siobhan McDonald, acrylic paint:

“Bones” by Susan J. Schrader, wood, acrylic, nail, silver thread, aluminum:

“Striped Sea Bass” by Kirsten Bassion, stoneware:

There were tons more cods we didn’t find. You can view them all (with much higher quality photos than mine and with information about the artists and the storefronts) at the auction site:

When we got home that evening the whole country put on a show, probably for Marblehead’s Festival of Cod but maybe also for another holiday. Here are this summer’s 4th of July fireworks viewed from our home in Peabody/Salem, in the direction of Peabody and Danvers and the sunset.

That sunset:

Years ago, on the 4th of July, rather than go to a single fireworks show my family went driving in Pennsylvania, hills and valleys and hills and valleys, passing town after town, and at all times we were surrounded by fireworks, not one show but many, all at once and all around us. It was my favorite 4th of July. This 4th of July felt like that. Ocean air, not cold Pennsylvania air, and the window of a house, rather than a car driving and the wind on us, and different people I love around me—but like that.

When they started out, Peabody, Danvers, and Salem all started out as a part of Salem. Salem Village, which is what you think of when you think of Salem (and where the witch trials happened) is in the current-day Danvers, wedged in an unassuming residential neighborhood. Danvers State Hospital, or Arkham Asylum, is of course also in Danvers, and on my partner Cory’s drive to work every day. History. The North Shore has history.

Cod Fest was our first time in Marblehead. Marblehead is all ocean and hills and rocks and remarkably (for America) old (older than America) buildings. I started out photographing every building with a plaque, but I very quickly stopped being impressed by anything from the mid-1700s onwards (and was starting to be a danger to myself and drivers in very fancy cars trying to navigate roads that weren’t built for any kinds of cars). The North Shore has wonderfully many houses that are older than America and in which people continue to live.

Here are some houses we saw in Marblehead from the early 1700s and earlier, including three houses from the 1600s. The earliest we saw on this walk was 1636:

Here’s what the world around these houses looks like:

Little Library DIY

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We made our own little library! Our little library is not only an accomplishment of a yearslong fantasy, it is also a constant source of joy when people stop by and a great excuse to buy books. I did most of the planning and designing, with construction and style guidance from my parents and my partner Cory and our friend and housemate and generous feudal lady PJ, and fixing from Cory, an actual mechanical engineer, when things broke. I think PJ wanted to buy a professionally built little library, at least at first, but I wanted to do something ill-advised, amateurish, in retrospect possibly manic, and from the soul and also to use a dremel for the first time in ten years.

Our little library is painted black and the books have a sometimes spooky tint, because we live in a not-yet-painted-black house that may or may not have its own soul (and if it does have its own soul, or a visiting soul (other than our visiting souls, of course), it is absolutely a spooky one) across the street from a graveyard in Salem—which of course means that most of our neighbors and subsequently most of the visitors to our little library have died. Spooky books are often also joyful books, and hopeful books—but sometimes just spooky.

This is a blog post about how we made the library/libraries. Spoiler alert, it ends up looking like this:

This blog post includes links with my Amazon referral code. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. If you click a link and buy something, I get about 4% of the price as commission. You don’t have to buy these things from Amazon—actually, you don’t have to buy these things at all. You can also support me by buying merch of my art, by buying me a campground store decaf coffee, or by simply reading and enjoying. Thank you!

Ingredients

Here’s everything I bought to make the library:

  • A reasonably-sized waterproof bathroom cabinet, to serve as the larger library—we painted it black, but this one was originally white, which already looked very nice as a potential library
  • A narrow waterproof bathroom cabinet, to serve as the small library—this one is dark brown, since it was closest to the intended black, but it also comes in white
  • A five-pack of 8×10″ plexiglass, to serve as the windows
  • Durable, waterproof plastic file folders, to serve as the roofs—in black since our library is black, but you can get colorful ones instead
  • Mounting tape, to attach the windows and the roof
  • Black outdoor paint, to paint the cabinets our preferred color, which was black—but you can choose a different color, or you can choose to not paint your libraries at all
  • Barrels to plant your libraries in—I bought these fancy wooden bucket barrels (18 inch, 15 inch, and 11.5 inch diameter, one for each library and the smallest destined for flowers). I like them a lot because the real wood and its smell and its texture and the metal handles were important to me because smells and textures are important to me in general, but they are expensive; cheaper, perfectly acceptable, possibly more durable plastic bucket barrels exist, and different sizes and shapes and quantities of the wooden ones—this is the fun part; you could even get this weird wishing well planter I’ve been trying to find some excuse to buy (but I have nothing in particular I want to do with it and nowhere in particular I want to put it) and stick a library in it, which is what I would probably try to do if we decided to add a third library

And here are things we already had that we also used:

  • A dremel, to cut out interestingly shaped window-holes
  • A sturdy pocketknife, to cut the plexiglass to fit the window-holes
  • Variously sized small pieces of scrapwood, to attach the roofs to and to make lock-type turning mechanisms so the doors don’t blow away
  • A drill and drill bits and screws, to attach the roofs so they don’t blow away and to attach the lock-type turning mechanisms
  • Lots and lots of rocks
  • Dirt
  • Flowers
  • A very strong glue to fix things when they break, like JB-Weld or Gorilla glue

And some things I bought to put in the library once we built it:

Methods

Here’s how we built the library.

First, I assembled the smaller of the two shelves. (In retrospect, I should have waited until after dremeling the doors, but it worked out fine.)

The shelf fit nicely in its intended bucket, as intended, with some books in it.

I dremeled windows into the doors of both the small shelf, which was easy because I just sliced the spaces between the horizontal gaps, and the larger shelf, which was more challenging. I tried to make the windows large enough that you could see in and see the books. I considered adding more windows to the other sides of the shelves, which you could if you wanted to, but we decided on just the doors.

(Does what I’m doing make you slightly uncomfortable? It probably should. I have no training in this except Science Olympiad in high school.)

I also reoriented the doors of the larger shelf to open in opposite directions because that is more interesting.

Here is how the larger shelf looks, dremeled and assembled:

I like how the large shelf looks as a white shelf, and white might be a good fit for a different project, but we had a whole vibe planned so it had to be painted black. I think it turned out nice and dramatic.

I measured and cut as large rectangles of plexiglass as would fit across each of the doors of the small shelf, covering the windows I had dremeled in (and which had partly already existed before my dremeling). I attached the plexiglass to the doors using mounting tape, which apparently is used for cars so it is probably good enough for this purpose as well.

I cut small straps off a skirt belt I didn’t like and curled them into door handles for the larger shelf, and attached them using mounting tape as well.

Then I cut and attached the plexiglass windows on the doors of the larger shelf—big rectangles covering both the big window holes and the little door handle holes.

Here’s how they turned out, with books inside:

To make a roof, I decided to use file folders, supported by wooden blocks that had been used to deliver furniture. Here is what that brainstorming looked like.

I painted the wooden blocks black and used mounting tape to attach them to the libraries.

I wanted the roofs to be waterproof, and black, so I ordered black plastic file folders and used them as roofs, attached also with mounting tape. Cory told me that when he was improving on this idea later he mentioned my use of plastic file folders as roofs to a coworker, who said that non-engineers sometimes come up with creative ideas to engineering challenges that a person boxed in by an engineering education might not have come up with. A very kind compliment.

They turned out quite nice, I think. Very witchy and spooky.

Here they are in their buckets, outside. We reserved the bottom part of each shelf to fill with rocks so that the libraries would be heavy and more or less sturdy. The shelf comprising the smaller library is actually upside down—the now-bottom shelf used to be the top shelf, intended to store toilet paper.

We bought flowers to plant in the buckets alongside and around the libraries:

Here is Cory planting the flowers. We planted the flowers on the sides and filled the rest of the space in the buckets with dirt. The smaller of the shelves is entirely dedicated to a flower we saw a lot of bees on, which seemed like a very good sign.

Here is how they turned out, after sunset and full of books. Very spooky and cozy:

We bought a ton of books to fit in the libraries. Here are some of the books we bought:

We dedicated the hall window overlooking the libraries to the books we plan to add to the libraries. Here they are at various moments. We ended up moving them from the windowsill to a dedicated shelf under it because there got to be too many.

PJ officially registered our libraries. Here are the fancy materials they sent us, including a little plaque:

Here are the libraries with their plaque. PJ also got a gorgeous flag and a wooden sign and little reading owls sculptures.

Here’s where dreams meet reality, and it gets a little sad—but happy and better afterward. Around Halloween we had a very bad windstorm and everything that could blow away did. The library flag blew away and we found it somewhere down the street. The roof folders blew away and we did not find them. The skeleton hand you can see in the mulch also blew away and we found it later near the graveyard (maybe it was trying to return home). The fence came down, thankfully missing the libaries.

There were two problems we kept running into: one was wind and the other was rain. The roofs kept blowing away, and mounting tape was just not doing the trick. And the doors kept blowing open, letting in rain and getting the books soaked. Twice a door was blown open hard enough that it broke off.

Cory is an actual engineer. He made nice wooden door locks to keep the doors from blowing open and drilled them into the libraries.

Cory also fixed the broken door with superglue.

Finally, Cory added additional wooden supports for the roofs, and drilled screws through the roofs into the supports. No more flying away.

I’m very grateful to Cory for supplementing my—um—creativity with thoughtful and weather-aware actual engineering. Here’s how the libraries turned out, with their improvements:

And here they are now: