AUSTIN WATER LOSS · BRIEFING
How much water does one bad shower handle waste?
A handle that won't quite close leaks a tenth of a gallon a minute. That's 144 gallons a day — and it never gets smaller.
A shower handle that stops a quarter-turn short of closed doesn't drip. It runs: a pencil-thin stream you can barely hear from the next room. Measured with a bag and a stopwatch, a typical bad cartridge passes about a tenth of a gallon a minute.
A tenth of a gallon a minute is 6 gallons an hour, which is 144 gallons a day, which is more water than the shower itself uses. A ten-minute shower at 2.1 gallons per minute is 21 gallons. The broken handle spends that before breakfast and then keeps going.
At Austin's upper residential tiers the leak alone is roughly $50 to $70 a month, and because tiered pricing charges your last gallons at the highest rate, a leak is always billed at your most expensive tier. The fix is a $25 cartridge and one YouTube video. The diagnosis is free: if the drain is wet an hour after the last shower, you have this problem.