Do you know why you’re very important, water-wise? Actually, we all are very important because more than 60% of our public water supply goes to households – to some 240 million of us at home, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Collectively, we draw about 43 billion gallons every day from the public supply system for our homes. And another 4 billion gallons a day are withdrawn by households from self-supplied sources such as privately owned wells.

While conserving water is an obviously worthwhile goal as we use so much, yet another benefit is not always thought about – and that is the savings of electricity required to treat and move our water around, before and after we use it. Our public water supply facilities use enough electricity every year, about 56 billion kilowatt-hours (kwh), to power more than five million homes.

Looking at it another way, we could save about 100 million kwh of electricity every year if just one household in every hundred (one percent) was retrofitted with water-efficient fixtures – which would be like taking nearly 15,000 cars off the road and preventing 80,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions, says the EPA.

Or if one out of every 100 American homes just replaced their older, inefficient toilets with the new WaterSense labeled models, they would cut water consumption enough to save 38 million kwh of electricity a month, enough to power 43,000 households.