Sunday, June 28, 2015

Water shaming in CA

You can now look up which urban water districts are using the most residential water, courtesy of the LA Times (thanks FlowingData for the link).  

It just so happens that I have data on our monthly water bills for the last 14 years; our utility reports in terms of cubic feet, so our average of ~11 cubic feet per day for a 4-person family is ~20 gallons per person per day, compared to the average of 83 gallons per person per day for California.



I will offer my usual complaint that while averages are informative, I would really like to see distributions of water usage by district.  LA Times, show us some side-by-side boxplots so that we can see whether the average is due to a generally high usage in the population, or whether that average is pulled up by a few citizens with their own private Sea Worlds.

No comments:

Post a Comment