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A few months ago, my mom asked me if there was anything she could do to reduce the amount of water that was being used from washing hands in the bathroom.  She was looking for something she could either attach to the faucet or replace the faucet all together.  Living in the desert of Arizona, water gets very expensive.  When she asked me, I didn’t find anything right away online.  However, while recently doing some research into products that I want to put into my next home and stumbled into something called WaterSense. 

WaterSense is a label put out by the EPA to promote water-efficient products. By installing a WaterSense labeled bathroom faucet or accessory, you could reduce the amount of water by 30%.  Now pay attention, because I said faucet or accessory.  What I mean there is, my mom can go to the store and buy an aerator (with the WaterSense logo), then simply unscrew the old aerator from the faucet and screw the new one on.  No tools required.  This also means, that when I go to do all the upgrades on my new house (and there will be a lot of upgrades), I can buy a faucet with the WaterSense label on it.  If they tend to be more expensive, I’ll just buy whatever faucet I want and then spend a couple bucks on the aerator.

I don’t know why this WaterSense concept isn’t being promoted more.  This even goes beyond just faucets, but also toilets, showerheads, landscape irrigation and even just every day practices for water conservation.  For me, the faucet one is by far the easiest to do.  It takes less than $5 and less than 5 minutes.  Even if you don’t consider yourself handy at all, give this one a try.  I think of the task being similar to replacing a light bulb and I know you can do that.  I actually had a hard time finding instructions on the web because it is so easy, but these are decent.  If you aren’t sure if your product is already a WaterSense labeled product, you can look up products that qualify on the EPA website.

In honor of tomorrow being World Water Day, I’d like to talk about ways to conserve water.

1. Turn off the water while brushing your teeth. This is actually something I’ve always done, but have been surprised at people that recently that don’t do this. If water runs straight from the faucet to the drain, with no use, it is very wasteful of clean water.
2. Only run the dishwasher with a full load. The dishwasher is supposed to be more efficient with water usage than hand washing dishes. That is really only true if the dishwasher is actually full.
3. Be smart when washing clothes. My washer has a setting on it to specify how large the load is that is being washed so that the washer will use the appropriate amount of water for the load. If you don’t have a setting on your washer, try to only run the washer on full loads of laundry.

There are many other ways to conserve water, from collecting rain water to just using less. In celebration of World Water Day, I’m taking a closer look at the ways that I use water and how perhaps I can be smarter about it. If anyone has suggestions on what they do to conserve water, I would love to hear about it.

The toilet is probably one of the biggest uses of water in your house, especially considering the number of times it gets used.  I’ve seen many tips about putting a bottle of water in your toilet so that it uses less water.  I was very confused by this until I recently read a blog post thoroughly explaining this.

This is primarily good for older toilets, in older homes like mine (no low-flow toilet available in 1950).  The way this works is that you take an old bottle of water.  Since I don’t drink bottled water very much, I used an empty bottle of Gatorade.  Fill the bottle with water, close it tight, and put it in tank of the toilet.  This works because the water in the tank fills to a certain line when the toilet is flushed. So the bottle takes up space in the tank, meaning that the tank will fill with less water.  If you use a 12 oz. bottle, the tank will fill with approximately 12 oz. less of water.  Not enough that you will notice (I did this a few days ago and my husband still hasn’t noticed), but 12 oz. less water used every time you flush can really add up.

If you already have a low-flow toilet, pat yourself on the back.  If you are about to build or remodel, you should really check out the dual flush toilets.  This is a great concept!  No, it does not flush twice as the name might imply.  It has two flush settings.  So if you only need a “little” flush (which is probably most of the time), you have that setting, but if things happen and you need a “big” flush then that is what the second setting is for.  I’ve heard this is rather popular is Europe and heard that some models essentially have one handle, where if you move it one way you get the “little” flush and if you move it the other you get the “big” flush.  I read about this over at treehugger.com.