Abstract
Variations in water fixtures and appliances coupled with different routines and preferences of users result in high levels of variability in residential water consumption. This study assessed differences in residential water use in terms of the timing and distribution of end uses across residential properties. Past studies analyzing residential end use of water have collected data for periods of time that may prevent the observation of temporal variations in indoor and outdoor water use practices. We examined indoor and outdoor residential water use at the household level by analyzing four to 23 weeks of 4-s resolution water use data at 31 single family residential properties in Logan and Providence, Utah, between 2019 and 2021. We identified and classified end uses of water for each property and analyzed monthly water use records to understand how water use varied for users at different levels of consumption. Our results indicated that indoor water use is influenced more by frequency of use than by the characteristics of water fixtures. At sites with longer data collection periods, indoor water use volume, timing, and distribution across end uses varied across homes and across weeks for which we collected data, indicating that short duration data collection intervals used by past studies may not have adequately characterized these variables. The paper presents opportunities to conserve water indoors and outdoors by adopting more efficient fixtures (particularly toilets) and promoting conservation behaviors. All the data and tools used in this study are freely available online for reuse.
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Data Availability Statement
The high resolution water use data set containing data for all 31 participant sites, anonymized information collected for each site, final end use events file, and log files indicating key information about each data collection period are publicly available in the HydroShare repository (Bastidas Pacheco et al. 2021a). The data set with events manually labeled by a resident of Site 19, from which our classification model was trained and tested, is also available in HydroShare (Bastidas Pacheco and Horsburgh 2022).
Reproducible Results
The code used to generate all the results presented in this paper is available in HydroShare (Bastidas Pacheco and Horsburgh 2022). Patricia Ayaa (Utah State University, Utah) downloaded and ran the code and reproduced the results presented.
Acknowledgments
This research was funded by the US National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1552444. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. Additional financial support was provided by the Utah Water Research Laboratory at Utah State University. We acknowledge the cities of Logan and Providence for their cooperation in the realization of the field data collection campaigns. The authors also gratefully acknowledge the homeowners who participated in our data collection efforts.
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Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Volume 149 • Issue 1 • January 2023
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Received: Nov 4, 2021
Accepted: Aug 29, 2022
Published online: Nov 3, 2022
Published in print: Jan 1, 2023
Discussion open until: Apr 3, 2023
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