Water Per Second – Save 1400 Hours In Your Lifetime Optimizing Water Transportation

Efficiency-Michael:

EDIT-This article is in need of an update

It was discovered waterbottles created a massive amount of trash and at least doubled the amount of time originally estimated. A gallon waterbottle is the new conclusion and the article will be updated in the future.

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I first started writing this article and completely expected this to be a silly study like Capsaicin Per Dollar. I find it fun to play with math, so why not:

3 Things I didn’t consider before starting:

Everyone must consume water, no exceptions. Ever. This is a non-trivial task that is difficult for any animal. We have plumbing. Water consumption happens daily, multiple times. This adds up over days, years, and lifetimes.

How to Save Time Drinking Water – The Data

Note: The time study was a single n=1 study. While exact oz/s will vary from situation to situation, everyone has similar situations. Transportation is often one of the largest hidden sources of waste, and it was found to be true for water.

Download Raw Data

Thoughts About The Data

Water dispenses out at pretty similar rates, with low flow water outlets being slightly slower.

Transportation is your largest waste of time. Having to fill 8 glasses of water a day adds up. Our goal will be to reduce transportation time.

The data is showing the advantages of leaving large cases of disposable water at your final destination. Despite having to walk down the isle at a grocery store, unpack the water from your vehicle, and dispose of water bottles, there are time savings over filling up your own water.

I bought my first case of water to conduct this study and my first thoughts on disposable water bottles as a product-

I lift weights and carrying water was seriously heavy

Both sides of the packaging ripped due to the heavy weight

In a single evening, I had 3 pieces of trash on my desk

Consider this could be my bias against environmentally harmful habits, but the time savings over Gallon Water Bottles is minor.

The Solution- Refillable Gallon Water Bottles

To visualize why Gallon Water Bottles are so effective at getting you water, consider how far away you are from a water source.

Making a round trip 8 times a day adds up to minutes per day, hundreds of hours in your life. Transportation waste is the largest time consumer. Optimize the tool for storing water to get 128 oz of water. Compared to 8oz cups of water, this is 16x less transportation. The largest time sink. Pareto?

We have been running with This water bottle for about 5 years.

Its big. You cannot feed this to a baby. There will be a day you spill this on you. Since water is pretty forgiving, I don’t mind it. Especially at 2am when you wake up needing water, in your mouth, right away. Disclaimer- As long as you arent stupid with it, it wont leak. After 5 years of use… We have… Trunk of Car…

Other 1 Gallon Options-

Drink out of gallon milk style containers? Not bad, but we did have one leak after a few months of use.

What About A Hose?

We are working on adding a hose for the new house. I highly recommend it, but apparently suburban culture isnt a big fan of hoses coming down from living room ceilings.

Will take pictures when its complete and beautified for suburban living rooms.

This has me visualizing a closet sized bathroom next to the couch… Living Room Urinal? The unfortunate part is that Misses Efficiency actually encourages this. I just need to decorate it up for the moms 😛

Go Increase The Volume Of Your Drinking Container- You will notice the time savings immediately

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