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Welcome to Plum Landing.
We're on a mission for Plum.
We're competing against Kaya, Kiana, Kalea and their family
to see who can save the most water in a week.
We're using the bathroom.
Yes, we're using the bathroom
because there's a lot of water that gets used in the bathroom
and we want to try to reduce that.
Elisabeth and Phillipe have a family of four.
We have a family of five.
So I'm not participating in the race.
So I'll be the narrator and the timekeeper.
Some things in the bathroom are private,
so we're not going to show you everything.
For the toilet, we're keeping track
of how many flushes people do in a day.
I'm not going to flush it now,
because that would be wasting water.
We learned on the Internet that a typical toilet
would use three gallons of water with each flush.
So that's what we are doing
to figure out our toilet water usage.
In order to measure the amount of water that we use in the sink
we need to know how much water comes out of the sink
in ten seconds.
So I'm going to run the water and count to ten.
One Mississippi, two Mississippi...
Using "Mississippi" makes sure
that each second is one second long.
...nine Mississippi, ten Mississippi.
It is about two cups.
Say this week we ran the water for , seconds.
Since we used two cups of water
for every ten seconds the sink is on,
that means we'd use cups of water in one week.
There's cups in a gallon,
so cups is the same as gallons of water.
We did the same thing with the shower.
Now we know that we use three cups of water
for every ten seconds the shower is running.
We are going to make three charts:
one for toilet flushes, one for using the sink
and one for how long you take your shower.
So we need to record how much water we use in the sink,
the shower and the toilet for one week.
For one week we didn't save water.
We just did our normal thing.
We probably wasted some.
And during that week we used gallons of water.
We kept track of our typical water use for one week
without saving water.
Phillipe and Elisabeth's family used gallons of water
in one week when they weren't trying to save water.
Now we're trying to conserve water.
We don't want to keep the sink on for two minutes
just to brush our teeth.
We're trying to take shorter showers.
Of course, we're using our charts to keep track
of how many times we flush the toilet,
how long we've been taking showers
and how long we've been using the water in the sink.
My sister's taking a shower.
I'm going to time her, how long she uses the shower.
[stopwatch clicks]
[stopwatch clicks]
Hmm, that shower was about three minutes.
Plum and the kids learned that there's no new water being made
on our planet.
All the water we use comes from rain and snow
that collects in lakes and rivers and underground.
That's why we want to conserve water,
which means not to use too much.
This was a sneaky thing we learned on the Web.
If you put a full brick into your toilet t*nk,
you will use one quart less of water when you flush.
For the rest of the week, both families recorded their data:
the toilet flushes per person
and the length of time that the sink and the shower were used.
[phone rings]
Hello.
Hi, Elisabeth.
Hi, Kalea.
Did you do your water saving this week?
Yep. How much water did you save?
For the whole week, we saved gallons.
How about you guys?
We actually did a trick to save water
by putting a brick in the toilet t*nk.
We saved , almost gallons.
Whoa! I thought we did pretty good, but you guys won the race.
It doesn't matter.
We both saved lots of water.