Saving water

We have a tap in the kitchen that has been dripping since we moved into the house, and all attempts at fixing it have been unsuccessful. Our DIY skills just don’t extend to include taps with ceramic plates and grit trapped in the middle. Listening to the dripping yesterday reminded me again that we really must do something about it, wasting water like that is plain silly.

The problem with water conservation in Scotland is that in general we have loads of the wet stuff and it keeps coming... On top of that in a lot of areas we are not even metered on water usage, so there is no financial gain in closing the taps. In general the incentives for saving water are almost non-existent here, but just because we have plenty supply that doesn’t mean we should be playing about with something that valuable.

So I decided to have a quick look and see if there are some easy water saving advice out there. Again I got down to a couple of different categories, the useful ones, the ones that involve money and the just silly ones...

- Don’t leave the tap running when you brush your teeth. This one I guess is useful, if you tend to leave the tap running, I don't though. Frankly I am not quite sure why you would leave the tap running? Does it make a soothing sound or does it make your teeth cleaner?

- Fix any dripping taps. Well I know we need to do this, but plumbers don't come cheap.

- Take shorter showers. Now this advice I will probably have to implement at some level, I know that I am more than guilty of taking long showers. It is my luxury in the morning, because it gives me a little bit of quiet time to sort my thoughts, before starting the day. I read in a Danish energy book that you should take an egg timer with you to the bathroom and set it for 5 minutes, that way you know exactly when you have been in the shower too long. I guess I will have to give it a go tomorrow (or maybe the day after...).


- Put a brick in the cistern, that way the water level will be reached quicker when refilling, and obviously less water will be used. Something else I will need to try out. I am sure there must be a stray brick somewhere in the garage or the back of the garden - I just need to find it!

- Get a water butt. This is something I would definitely do, it seems a pretty straight forward thing to do, and it makes sense to collect rainwater to water your garden – the only problem is that it costs money. Money that I haven’t got. So like quite a few other improvement it will just have to wait till the bank balance looks a bit healthier.

-Use a watering can when watering the garden rather than the hose. That way you kind of get tired before using up huge quantities of water. Again another straight forward idea, although slightly out of season by now - we don't tend to get long dry spells in Scotland in the autumn...


So far so good, nothing too demanding and generally cheap suggestions - I just need to get my act together.

As always there are lots of items you can buy or install to save water, e.g.flow reducing aerators for the shower head, ultra-low water usage cisterns or even composting toilets, but these things cost money and are therefore not an option!


But there are also more adventurous suggestions. The Guardian is suggesting installing a grey water system that can take water from the washing machine into the toilet, which makes perfect sense to me - it is almost obscene that we use drinking quality water to flush away our waste. However I am not quite sure how the system works and you would obviously need somebody to install it for you (=another expense), but it might go on my green wish list.

Tesco is also talking about grey water systems in their new 'greener living' section, unfortunately they are about as good at giving green advice as they are at selling local produce. Amongst the 'brilliant' ideas for saving water it is suggested to use the water from the bathtub or the shower to water the garden. All fine and well, but how I am supposed to get the water from the bathtub to the garden??? It would be a lot of work to carry it all out in buckets and by the time I would have finished I would be so sweaty I would need another bath. I am not even going to start thinking about how to get water from the shower drain to the garden... OK, fair enough they do actually suggest that you can set up a hose running from the bath and out of the window, but I struggle to see that working. The principle is obviously the same as emptying a fish tank, but it would take quite some suction to get the water flowing through the meters of hose you would need to get to an upstairs bathroom. The stuff you want to water is probably not going to be right under the bathroom window either, so to distribute the water you would either need a very long hose from the bath (=even bigger suction problems) or another bathtub under the window to collect the water in... Oh yes, Tesco- every little helps!


At least there is a bit more creativity to be found from a Brazilian environmental group, who has been running a campaign this summer encouraging people to pee in the shower. They calculated that an average household can save up to 4.400 litres of water every year, by reducing the number of times the toilet is flushed by just one per day. So if you are in the shower anyway, why not engage in a bit of multitasking... Their slogan is: 'pee in the shower, save the Rain Forest' (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEulkK7SpRs) Hmm, I might just have to think about that one.