Maths is fun with our favourite water company
New water saving advice from Thames Water teaches us the error of our ways and reminds us of the joys of numbers
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The Barrie Hudson Column
Barrie Hudson is a known quantity when it comes to writing words. Sometimes he even spells them correctly. In fact he has been writing words in the Swindon area for more than two decades. First of all for the Swindon Advertiser and then for Swindon Link and now for The Ink. Here are some of his words…
Amid the stifling heat wave, what better way to keep our minds sharp than some fascinating arithmetic?
Thames Water has been offering customers tips on saving water amid the driest spring in over a century.
There will be some people who greet the news of this company offering water-saving advice or any other advice pertaining to the environment as an act of pure effrontery.
In fact, I daresay there will be some people who say they can think of no greater act of effrontery apart, perhaps, from answering a call of nature through a random letterbox, ringing the doorbell and cheerily asking the horrified and disgusted householder how far your effort went up the hall carpet.
That is a matter of opinion, of course, but one thing about the advice from Thames Water is that it includes some interesting statistics of a kind which give us a much-needed reminder that maths is fun as well as sharpening the mind.
For example, the company says its latest research shows that showering for two minutes less each day can save 20 litres of water, or enough to fill two buckets, and that keeping the bathroom tap running while cleaning one's teeth can use six litres of water unnecessarily every minute.
In addition, a leaking toilet, according to Thames Water, can waste up to 400 litres a day.
I love the way in which some relatively simple arithmetic can yield all manner of fascinating facts.
For example, take that statistic regarding keeping the bathroom tap running while cleaning one's teeth and wasting six litres a minute. This prompted me to do some calculations of my own, and I discovered - and I’m open to correction by people better than me at number-crunching - that if you left your bathroom tap running at full blast for an entire day, you'd waste 8,640 litres. And if you did it for a year, you'd waste 3,153,600 litres.
And if you left that tap running until the year 2205, or 180 years from now, you'd waste the same amount of water Thames Water loses through its knackered pipes every single day, according to the most recent figures I can find.