Greening Your Bath Water – Conservation Tips

According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), indoors, 3/4 of all water is used in the bathroom.

One easy and inexpensive way to green your bathroom is to simply save water. Reducing your personal water usage has a tremendous positive impact on the environment and on your wallet. The first step is being mindful of your habits. Do you leave the water running while brushing your teeth? Does your husband shave with a constant stream of hot water running from the faucet? Do you let warm-up water go down the drain while drawing a bubble bath? Changing one of these costly habits will result in immediate savings to you and your planet.

To save even more money by conserving water, consider installing an aerator on your faucet. Without an aerator, water usually flows out of a faucet as one big stream. An aerator spreads this stream into many little droplets. This helps save water and reduces splashing.

Showering represents approximately 17 percent of residential indoor water use in the United States—more than 1.2 trillion gallons of water consumed each year. Inexpensive and simple to install, low-flow shower heads can reduce your home water consumption as much as 50%, and reduce your energy cost of heating the water also by as much as 50%

To cut down on water waste, put an inch or two of sand or pebbles inside each of two plastic bottles to weigh them down. Fill the bottles with water, screw the lids on, and put them in your toilet tank, safely away from the operating mechanisms.

You can also purchase an inexpensive “tank bank”. This may save ten or more gallons of water per day.
TIP: Be sure at least 3 gallons of water remain in the tank so it will flush properly.

If you are in the market for a new toilet, consider a “low flush” model which use 1 to 2 gallons per flush instead of the usual 3 to 5 gallons.

Replacing an 18 liter per flush toilet with an ultra-low volume (ULV) 6 liter flush model represents a 70% savings in water flushed and will cut indoor water use by about 30%.

No matter what model toilet you use, never flush garbage of any kind. Every time you flush a cigarette butt, facial tissue or other small bit of trash, five to seven gallons of water is wasted.

source: greenlivingguide.org