Day Seventy-Six - Gone To The Dogs

Repurposing All Our "Stale" Water

Continuing on my water conservation kick here, folks. Going to see if I can keep it up all week. Let's start with some 411. We've got a dog -- a big girl, weighing in at just under 100 pounds -- our black lab/husky mix "Oreo" goes through about three bowls of water per day. Each dish of water holds 4 cups of water, so that's .75 gallons of water per day, 5.25 gallons per week, 273 gallons per year. Now before you get on the phone to PETA because you think I'm going to stop watering the dog, just listen.

Every day, the kids and I fill up our reusable water bottles and head out on our merry way. They are usually refilled a couple times throughout the day and are taken to bed at night. Hubby also drinks water in the evenings and he usually leaves his half-full glass on the coffee table, where it leaves a nice white ring. So by the next morning I have four water cups with varying amounts of "stale water" in them. Of course, with our super-high American standards, there's no way we'd drink the stale water, so it gets dumped down the drain. Until today.

Fortunately for us, Oreo has much lower standards than we do. I mean seriously lower. I saw her eat dirt yesterday. Not because she was hungry, just because it was there and looked like it might be tasty. Anyhow, she now is the lucky recipient of all our stale water. She will also be receiving all the crazy ice cubes that leap forth from the ice dispenser, in what appears to be a last ditch effort to escape the inevitable.

All this water adds up too. It fills her bowl to the brim at least once, usually with enough left over to water the three houseplants I have somehow managed not to kill yet. This then cuts her bowl refilling by 1/3, reducing her total "new" water consumption to a half a gallon per day.


Savings:

Simply put: .25 gallons per day, 1.75 gallons per week, 7.5 gallons a month, 91 gallons per year. Good Doggy! If all 73 million American dog owners did that, we'd save over 6.5 BILLION gallons a year.


Difficulty Level: 1 out of 5

Much easier than cleaning those white rings off the coffee table...