Watering lawns? How much water is it we use.

I recently was sent an article from a member of our site talking about the fact that residents could only water their lawns every other week. They also stated that an inch a week would be adequate for the lawn.

To put this in to perspective an inch of rain on an acre of land is approximately 22,610.66 imperial gallons or 102,790.15 liters of water. If you take these numbers and figure that there are approximately 16 weeks of watering lawns it becomes clear how much is used.

I asked the average size of a lawn and received many different figures but for argument's sake let's say the lawn is 80 feet by 100 feet; this would be 8,000 square feet. Multiply this by 144 = 1,152,000 square inches, then divide this number by 277.41 the number of cubic inches in an imperial gallon, and we get 4152.69 imperial gallons (18878.54 liters) every week or 66,443.04 imperial gallons (302,050.06 liters) of water used for the year.

If we say this city has 50,000 homes, with that size of lawn, that is 3,322,152,000 imperial gallons of water (15,115,791,600 liters) consumed for watering lawns.

We keep hearing we should switch to low flow toilets as they save approx 2 gallons of water per flush, so the water we have is saved. It is a vital resource. Well the old style waste your water toilets used 7 gallons per flush, and the water that is going to be used on lawns would flush the toilet 474,593,143 times (26 times a day per household).

I know that this is a lot of numbers, but I thought it was worth making people aware of just how much water is being wasted on the lawn watering.

There has been a lot of concern over water being used for agricultural purposes and how it effects fresh water reserves. The point I am trying to make is that the water used by agriculture is for food production and not for appearance. Food crops are produced on between 4.5 and 8 inches of watering, not the 16 inches estimated for lawn upkeep.