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Reduce
- Don't use the toilet as a wastebasket or flush it unnecessarily.
- Take short showers – five minutes or less should do. If you prefer baths, fill the tub only one-quarter full.
- Keep a bottle of drinking water in the refrigerator rather than letting your tap run to get cold water when you want a drink. (Rinse the bottle every few days.)
- More than 50% of the water applied to lawns and gardens is lost due to evaporation or run-off because of overwatering. As a general rule, most lawns and gardens require little more than 2 to 3 cm (1 inch) of water per week. To reduce losses due to evaporation, water early in the morning (after the dew has dried).
- When washing a car, fill a bucket with water and use a sponge. This can save
about 300 litres of water
Repair
- Leaks can be costly. A leak of only one drop per second wastes about 10,000 litres
of water per year. Most leaks are easy to find and fix at very little cost.
- Leaking faucets are often caused by a worn out washer that costs pennies to
replace. Most hardware stores will have faucet repair kits with illustrations showing
how to replace a washer.
- A toilet that continues to run after flushing, if the leak is large enough, can waste
up to 200,000 litres of water in a single year! To find out if your toilet is leaking,
put two or three drops of food colouring in the tank at the back of the toilet. Wait
a few minutes. If the colour shows up in the bowl, there’s a leak.
- Toilet leaks are often due to a flush valve or flapper valve that isn’t sitting properly
in the valve seat, bent or misaligned flush valve lift wires, or a corroded valve seat.
All of these can be fixed easily and inexpensively.
Retrofit
Toilets
You can install a water-saving device inside
the tank or, if the toilet is more than fifteen
years old – which means it probably uses
about 18 or more litres of water per flush –
you can replace it with an ultra-low-volume
toilet.
Showerheads and faucets
After the toilet, the shower and bath
consume the most water inside the home.
Conventional showerheads have flow rates
up to 15 to 20 litres per minute. A properly
designed low-flow showerhead can reduce
that flow by half and still provide proper
shower performance.
Conventional faucets have an average
flow rate of 13.5 litres of water per minute.
Low-flow aerators will reduce this flow. In the
bathroom, a flow rate of about 6 litres per minute should suffice, and in the kitchen
a flow rate of 6 to 9 litres per minute is sufficient.
Outdoors
During the growing season, water use can increase by as much as 50%. While
lawns require a lot of water, much of this water is wasted due to over watering
and evaporation.
Sprinklers should be suited to the size and shape of the lawn to avoid watering
driveways and sidewalks. Sprinklers that lay water down in a flat pattern are better
than oscillating sprinklers which lose as much as 50% of what they disperse through
evaporation. Drip irrigation systems which apply water only to the roots zone are
the most efficient – and the most expensive – alternative.
The water you use to water your lawn doesn’t have to come out of a tap. A cistern
or rain barrel, which captures and stores rainwater, can be used as a source of
irrigation water.
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