Yesterday I vowed to stop watering my lawn, turn off the artificial river in my backyard, and not run my clothes washer once for each sock that I put in it. Today I went out and checked the level of Lake Norman. Still dropping. What’s going on? Everyone is conserving. Why is it dropping so much? A little known and not very well publicized fact—your light bulbs are using water.

While you take a 5 minute shower and use 15 gallons of water, the lightbulbs in your bathroom require a pint of water to cool the power generation equipment at the nuclear or coal-powered station. If you have an electric bathroom heater you are using another gallon of water at the power station. It gets worse from there. Of the 15 gallons of water used in the shower, almost all makes it back into the river and lake system eventually. The net loss of water is probably a gallon. Of the 10 or so gallons of water used to generate the electricity for the lights and heat, almost a gallon is evaporated—gone forever from our local water system.

Here’s an easy way to figure out how much water you lose each month. Find the number of kilowatt-hours you consumed in your last electric bill and multiply that figure by 27. That’s the number of gallons of water used to generate that power. Now multiply the kilowatt-hours you consumed by 0.75. That’s the number of gallons of water that’s evaporated from generating that power and is gone forever from our river and lake system. Last month my household lost 300 gallons of water from electricity consumed.

Now compare that to the amount of water that passes through your home. Find the amount of water that you use, measure in CCF (hundred cubic feet). Multiply that figure by 750 to get the number of gallons that you use. If you don’t water your lawn and tend not to use a lot of hot water or your clothes dryer much, multiply your water (CCF) use by about 50. That’s the amount of water lost to evaporation. If you water your lawn and use your clothes dryer a lot, multiply your water use (CCF) by about 150. Last month my household lost 240 gallons of water to evaporation from water use alone. We lost more water from our electrical appliance than from our water-using appliances.

In the next 20 years our per-capita power use is expected to rise about 15 percent as we use more gadgets and computers. Showering for one minute less will make no difference whatsoever if we keep using power the way we do.

Robert Lee lives on Goodrum Street.

RELATED OPINIONS

Feb. 15, 2007, Shelley Rigger, “Time to preserve the ‘right to dry,’” a column urging the return of the clothes line as an energy-saving device.