Logging her family of four’s daily water usage revealed an unexpected pleasant surprise

HOW much water do you use per week? No matter how careful you are about turning off the tap when you brush your teeth, timing your shower or limiting your bath water, it’s impossible to know exactly without checking the whirring numbers on the water meters currently being installed by Irish Water.

With this is in mind, I set out to test exactly how much water our family of two adults and two children under the age of eight used over a 13-day period.

A data logger – a small device that transmits the data it logs to an app on our smart phones – was placed on Irish Water’s meter outside our front gate, allowing us to measure our daily usage. We feared our usage would be enormous. But we were wrong.

The Government predicts the average household will pay €240 a year based on EU statistics which say the average person consumes about 150 litres per day or 54,750 litres a year.

This would mean our household of four would consume about 219,000 litres of water annually.

In reality, however, we consumed an average of 340 litres per day over the two weeks, putting us on course to use 124,000 litres annually.

With a promised free allowance of 30,000 litres per household plus 38,000 litres per child, this would leave our family paying for just 18,000 litres per year.

As Government sources suggest the final water charge will be between €2 and €3 per 1,000 litres, this would mean a bill of between €36 and €54 per year.

We live in a three-storey Victorian terrace house on Dublin’s northside with no water conserving appliances. Our usage included things like washing ourselves and the children every day, at least two washing machine loads a day and usually two dishwasher loads per day.

It also included occasional events like a friend staying over, watering our newly planted garden, hosting a messy children’s party and a dinner party for several adults.

It also takes account of my youngest child’s favourite game, ‘cafés’ where he fills about eight plastic beakers with water and then empties them, fills them and empties them again ad infinitum.

At least one of us is working from home four days a week and the children are home each afternoon with a child minder, meaning our water usage should be even higher than those out at work or school or college all day.

Still our usage was far below what we expected and what Irish Water and EU estimates predict.