Of course, some of the most important uses for water are at our homes. Domestic water use is water used for indoor and outdoor household purposes— all the things you do at home: drinking, preparing food, bathing, washing clothes and dishes, brushing your teeth, watering the yard and garden, and even washing the dog. In this Web site, domestic water use just covers self-supplied domestic water withdrawals - those people and organizations that use their own wells to supply their water, as opposed to public-supplied water.
Water generally gets to our homes in one of two ways. Either it is delivered by a city/county water department (or maybe from a private company), or people supply their own water, normally from a well. Water delivered to homes is called "public supplied" and water that people supply themselves is called "self supplied." People who supply their own water almost always use ground. The vast majority of America's population gets their water delivered from a public-supply system. This makes sense, as America's population now largely live in urban centers. You might want to check out a bar chart below that shows how the trend over the last 40 years of people moving to urban centers is reflected in the water use for domestic purposes.
For 2000, withdrawals were an estimated 3,720 Mgal/d or 4,170 thousand acre-feet per year. Self-supplied domestic withdrawals were about 1 percent of total freshwater withdrawals and about 2 percent of total freshwater withdrawals for all categories excluding thermoelectric power. About 45 million people were self-supplied. Ground water was the primary source of the water (98 percent). Between 1995 and 2000, self-supplied domestic withdrawals increased about 10 percent and the self-supplied domestic population increased almost 7 percent. However, the self-supplied domestic population remained at 16 percent of the total U.S. population
[d] - Data for this chart are available.
Since the end of World War II there has been a trend of people moving out of the rural countryside and into the ever-expanding cities. This has important implications for our water resources. Communities have had to start building large water-supply systems to deliver water to new populations and industries.
In times past, when most people lived in rural areas, they had to find ways to supply their own water - often by drilling a well and pumping water to their homes. Not many city dwellers have a well in their backyards today. A public-water supply system, such as your local water department, nowadays delivers water to most homes. The bar chart below shows the trend toward urbanization over the last 45 years. Notice how the blue bars (representing the millions of poeple served by a public water-supply system) keeps going up while the green bars (representing the number of people who supply their own water) trended downward until 10 years ago. For the last 10 years, the percentage of the population relying on public-supply systems has remained at about 84 percent.
Here is a bar chart showing the public-supplied and self-supplied populations in the U.S. from 1955-2000.
Sources and more information
Estimated Use of Water in the United States in 2000, USGS Circular 1268:
• Domestic water use, 2000:
Summary | Data table, by State | National map
U.S. Department of the Interior | U.S. Geological Survey
URL: http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/wudo.html
Page Contact Information: Howard Perlman
Page Last Modified: Friday, 07-Nov-2008 15:46:56 EST
