Green Europe

Conserve Water at Home

Most of us have probably been told to turn off the faucet while brushing our teeth or to take shorter showers to conserve water. But new technologies take water efficiency to unprecedented levels, allowing households to save both water and money.

John Koeller, technical adviser at the California Urban Water Conservation Council and the Alliance for Water Efficiency, gave Matthew Shulman of U.S. News some tips on how to conserve.
What new technologies are available to conserve water in the bathroom?

Toilet Fixtures
Toilets can yield significant water reduction through new high-efficiency toilets that flush with 1.3 gallons or less. The current standard in the U.S. is 1.6 gallons maximum. If you cannot afford to replace the toilet, at least try placing a household brick in the cistern to displace the water thus limiting the amount of water used to flush the toilet.

Bathroom Faucets
Bathroom faucets need aerators that [limit the flow to] a gallon per minute or less. It’s still sufficient to shave and wash your hands, but you really don’t need the kind of flows that existed maybe 15 or 20 years ago in older homes.

Shower Head
Install a low-flow shower head. Whereas the trend these days in the luxury homes seems to be high-flow shower systems with multiple heads, generally speaking, the trend on the efficient side is to come down to 2 to 2.5 gallons a minute on the shower head.

Let’s move to the kitchen
People are using their dishwashers less and less and less. Why is that? Because people are eating out more and more and more. Dishwashers that used to be used almost once a day are now cycling only 215 times a year. There are many machines out there that now function with less than 6 gallons. In the old days, it was perhaps as much as three times that much water.

How about the laundry room?

Now we have clothes washers that are so efficient that when it comes time to replace your old one, you ought to purchase an Energy Star washer. Energy use generally correlates with water use. So if you look for an Energy Star machine, you’re going to see both energy and water use reduction.
Faucets

There is nothing worse than a dripping tap both for us audibly and water conservation. At the first sign of a leaky faucet replace worn washers. This is especially important if your hot water tap is leaking. Hot water costs money that can be better spent elsewhere.

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