Water Down the Drain

As a follow up to my last post about clean drinking water I wanted to add a post about water conservation. Everyone knows how important this is but rarely takes the subject to heart. Water flows freely here in this country as it does in many other places with little pressure on conserving it; except in places like Colorado and California where there are frequent shortages. When we lived in Denver, CO some people would post signs in their brown front lawn saying “water conservation in progress”. One of our favorite Thai restaurants there had a sign at each table saying “due to the water shortage we are making an effort to conserve water, so glasses of water will only be served upon request”. While both of these examples are mildly amusing they actually have a good point.

I recently read a very good article on water conservation called “This is a turn off“. The article focuses on the fact that the average American uses about 151 gallons of water per day and gives suggestions on how to cut that consumption in half to 75. Some of the ideas are pretty farfetched, some are obvious, and others are uniquely interesting and make good sense.

Where you live may determine which new ideas you might be inspired to try out. For example in Denver I could hang up my pants or a second layer shirt like a long sleeve on a clothes rack and wear them a second time. It was so dry there that you barely sweat so your clothes wouldn’t get that stuffy or smell like mildew as they do in humid climates. That doesn’t work so well in Oregon, but here we don’t have to worry about running sprinklers; in fact we just disabled our preinstalled sprinkler system. There is hardly anything more annoying than seeing a sprinkler system running while it is raining. Instead we just water our lawn by hand when needed in the summer, and the rest of the time the rain covers our needs.

Plants need more water than grass but you can’t beat the travel distance of a tomato from your garden to the table vs one from the supermarket, so in my opinion a home garden is worth its weight in water. To conserve water with our gardening projects we water plants in the evening or early morning. This allows the water to soak in when the soil is cooled down; otherwise most of the water will just be burn off. Our hose also has an attachment with different settings like mist, shower, jet, soaker etc so that we can water according to the needs of the plants, and that enables us to turn the hose off from the attachment so it is only running when we are actually watering the plants or yard.

We do plan to implement a few new ideas we haven’t thought of before from the web article “This is a turn off“, such as using cooking water for gardening. I think I’ll skip using the bathwater option though since I probably wouldn’t be able to eat a tomato without wondering if there was a hint of safeguard in it. The clean toilet hack sounds reasonably easy, but I’ll leave the dirty toilet hack to the hippie communes. I’ve seen more than my share of composting toilets at hiking trailheads-YUK!

There are a few other things we already do around the house to conserve water. We’ve installed a low pressure shower head in our bathroom, and I turned down the water pressure on all of the facets to about 1/3 the normal amount, which is fine for our purposes. We have energy compliant appliances which use less energy and water, costing less in the long run. Whatever you decide to do everyone should at least think about how much water they personally use. At a bare minimum avoid doing wasteful things like leaving the water running while you are brushing your teeth or shaving, or running the dishwasher half empty; that’s just plain wasteful.

A photo from India courtesy of Lukasz Maciejczyk

One last water conservation trick I do that some people may find extreme, but I think is perfectly sensible, is follow the old rule of “if it’s yellow let it mellow, if it’s brown flush it down”. I first heard this from my college astronomy teacher who was the old hippie type. We all laughed when she said that, but it makes sense so I started practicing it. Of course I don’t always let it mellow otherwise the toilet would need to be cleaned constantly. Think about it though, if two people are going #1 in succession do you really need to flush two times and waste the extra 5-6 gallons of water? Millions of people in third world countries don’t even have running tap water, much less a flush toilet. I wonder what they think of our 150 gallon per person per day usage in the U.S.A.

As kids most of us were taught to flush the toilet after every use as a courtesy to the next person, but maybe we need to change our perception of what courteous is. “Honey don’t flush the toilet” may not sound very romantic but next time you think you might use the bathroom right after your significant other those six words could save six gallons of water. That much water may only be a nickel off your water bill, but over time it will add up. Over your lifetime and millions of others that little change in habit could mean the difference between our great-great grandkids in the 22^nd century having running tap water.