From news stories to letters to the editor to local blog postings, it's abundantly clear that Athens-Clarke County's public-water customers, both business and residential, are making significant efforts to conserve water. In fact, the community has achieved a 35 percent reduction in water use.
However, for many businesses and homeowners, gauging their individual successes - or, less happily, failures - to conserve water has boiled down to a vexing mathematics problem. Put simply, the easiest way to determine the efficacy of water conservation efforts is to find out how many gallons of water are being used per day. Unfortunately, the most readily available source of water consumption data, the monthly water bill, measures water use in cubic feet per month.
Here, in an effort to make the calculation of daily water use a bit easier for those monitoring their consumption, is some handy conversion information:
One cubic foot of water equals 7.48 gallons. Thus, to calculate monthly water use in gallons, simply multiply the number of cubic feet used per month by 7.48. Here are some handy benchmarks: 100 cubic feet of water equals 748 gallons; 1,000 cubic feet equals 7,480 gallons. To get daily usage, of course, simply divide the gallons derived from converting the monthly water bill by the billing period.
Here's some detail on the way the math works: There are 231 cubic inches in one U.S. gallon. A cubic foot, of course, is 12 inches by 12 inches by 12 inches, or 1,728 cubic inches. Dividing the number of inches in a cubic foot by the number of cubic inches in a gallon - 1,728 divided by 231 - yields the number of gallons in a cubic foot, 7.48.
There are any number of Web-based calculators that will do the figuring for you. One such site is www.lenntech.com/unit-conversion-calculator/volume.htm.
"The Problem" is a regular feature of Sunday's Insights & Ideas section. If you have a problem you think your local government can or should be doing something to address, e-mail details - with a photograph, if applicable - to Editorial Page Editor Jim Thompson at email@example.com. We'll get in touch with the proper local authorities and let readers know how the problem can be solved.
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