In this day and age of having to pay (sometimes dearly when I open up my monthly bill) for our water that we use to wash film and prints and the constant drum beat in our society of being "efficient" in the use of natural resources, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to share our personal experience with the tools that we use to accomplish this objective and let the audience benefit from this information. Not sure if this is a subject that has been collected previously. Maybe the next time you are washing prints and/or sheet film measure your water flow rate and share this information along with the specific equipment you are using and how long it takes you to accomplish your wash.

I will start. This afternoon I washed some 11x14 and 8x10 negatives in an Inglis dedicated sheet film washer and in the process I calculated a water flow rate of 1 Gallon Per Minute. My wash time is 15 minutes so my wash cycle per format used 15 gallons of water, which I felt was pretty reasonable all things considered.

If nothing else it will give me some factual information with which to defend myself as an "efficient" analog photographer that takes these issues seriously.