I typically take one shower a day for about 16 minutes and i want to see the effect of shortening my shower by 2 minutes.
To model this problem, I ...
wrote an equation that models my current lifestyle of water usage, which resulted in
y = 33.6d + 18,752.5. y represents the total amount of water usage throughout a whole year and d represents the amount of days. My average shower time is 16 minutes long, and by doing research I learned the average amount of gallons per minute in a shower is 2.1 gallons of water. So to get the total amount of water I use in 1 shower, I multiplied 16 by 2.1 which = 33.6. When I found the amount of gallons that were being consumed I was shocked that I use 33.6 gallons of water per shower (that is a lot of water.) I assumed that I used less water than that (maybe 20 gallons), but I was clearly wrong. This is only counting the amount of water I use when I shower, so I researched the average time of the amount a person uses when they use the toilet, drink water, do laundry, and use the dishwasher per year. Which all summed up to 18,752.5 gallons in total. These are the main things I use for water so I only chose these out of all the things I actually make use of. Now, for my other equation that models the impact when I change the amount of time I spend (shortening it by 2 min) which would be 14 min, I get 29.4 gallons of water used per shower. Having the grand equation of y= 29.4d+ 18,752.5. With these equations, I estimate that I will save up to 5 gallons of water comparing the time spent in only one shower (estimations of gallons used in a year would be 5 x 365). However with all this, one way I could improve/make more accurate of my model, is to put in the amount of other things I do that uses water in my daily life. And to even further the accuracy of my model, I could measure the actual amount of water I use and place those numbers in my equation, instead of using the average amount of water searched up on google.
Graphical Representation:
Link to your graph:
Equation that models the impact of my current lifestyle y= 33.6d+18752.5 (redline):
X-axis represents days
Y-axis represents the amount of gallons of water
Equation that models the impact of the time changed by 2 minutes y= 29.4d+18752.5 (blue line):
X-axis represents days
Y-axis represents the amount of gallons of water
Findings:
I found that in the equation of the amount of water I use in my current lifestyle, y= 33.6d + 18,752.5 in one year (365 days) I use a total of 31,016.5 gallons of water (shown on the graph with the redline). Whereas in the equation where I have changed the amount of time I spend in a shower (by 2 min) which the equation was y= 29.4d + 18,752.5, the total summed amount of water I would use per year (365 days) would be 29,483.5 gallons of water. The difference between these gallons of water is 1,533, which means the impact of changing my shower time from 16 min to 14 min would save 1,533 gallons of water per year. Knowing this, I feel a little amazed how shortening my shower time by only 2 min can save that much amount of water.