Summer may be a season where spirits are lifted and the exterior of your home becomes the living quarters, but it’s also a season where water usage can become a major issue.

Lawns begin to turn brown, garden plants start to show their thirst and many councils around New Zealand impose water restrictions as lake and reservoir levels begin to drop.

Water is one of the world’s greatest resources, yet it’s also one of the most under-appreciated. Anything you can do around your home to save water, or better utilise the water you have available, is doing something toward protecting the planet.

There are plenty of ways you can go about this – and not just when it comes to the garden or the lawn. By focusing on other areas of your home, you can have a huge impact on the amount of water you use.

Here are eight great ways of reducing your water usage:

 

OUTSIDE THE HOME

Taps and Hoses

Leaking taps outside the home can have a huge impact on your water usage, wasting huge amounts of water with even a small leak – thousands of litres a year in some cases. Even if your taps don’t leak, there’s a good chance that your hoses might, so make sure they are water-tight as well. If necessary, replaces the fitting on the ends to conserve water and cut out any leaking sections and replace them with jointers to prevent water being wasted.

Use a trigger-operated water ‘gun’ on the end of your hose so the stream of water gets shut off when you’re not using it rather than having a hose running when you don’t need the water.

 

Use a Broom

If you’re cleaning up around the outside of your home, use a broom to sweep away those leaves and debris rather than washing them off with a hose.  The results are going to be exactly the same, but using a hose is just going to waste a whole lot of water unnecessarily.

Wasing your Car

When you are washing your car, fill a bucket and use a sponge instead of using a hose fitted with a brush. A hose can use up to 15 litres of water every minute it’s left running – enough to fill a decent-sized bucket 1.5 times. When it comes to rinsing it off, use a hose fitted with a trigger-operated water ‘gun’ to prevent further water wastage.

Also when you are washing your car, try and do it on the lawn, so the grass gets the benefits from the run-off rather than having it drain away and be wasted.

The ‘grey’ water in the bucket can also be used to water plants or shrubs.
 

Collect Rainwater

Rainwater is effectively a free source of additional water, so why not utilize it by installing a rainwater harvesting system or collection tank. Marley produces a complete rainwater harvesting system, allowing homeowners to collect a considerable amount of water and divert it to a water storage tank. The system is really very easy to install and can be fitted directly to the downpipe dropper on your guttering system where a first-flush diverter purges the system of the initial ‘dirty’ water that comes off your roof, before diverting the clean water into a storage tank for future use. With the addition of a pump, the water in the tank can then be used for irrigation or even plumbed into a household toilet or laundry system, reducing the amount of water you’ll need to use from the mains system.

Irrigation

When watering your garden, do so in the early morning or in the evening to reduce the amount of water that evaporates in the heat of the day. Water sitting on the leaves of a plant during the day can also ‘magnify’ the sun and cause more damage to them. Also, put lots of mulch on the garden as this can reduce the amount of water that evaporates by a huge amount.

Mulch helps to retain the moisture in the garden and keep the soil from drying out. Another way of doing this is to use ground cover plants.

If you want to keep your plants moist, consider installing a ‘dripper’ as part of an irrigation system. These slowly release water at a pre-determined rate (1-2 litres per hour), which soaks in around the plant to a good depth in the soil.

A cheap alternative is to use a plastic bucket with a small hole punched in the bottom, which also allows it to be moved around from plant to plant as needed.

Remember, you’re trying to water the roots of  your plants, not the leaves, so direct the water to this area of your foliage or vegetables, and give them a good thorough water each time to encourage good, deep, healthy root systems.
 

INSIDE THE HOME
 

In the Bathroom

Leaking taps can use an extraordinary amount of water, even if it’s just a slow drip. In fact, the amount of water being wasted from a drippy tap is extraordinarily deceptive. Over a 12 month period, it’s actually possible to waste more than 20,000 litres from a single dripping tap in your home. If that water is coming from a hot tap, you’ll also be wasting money too.

Once of the most effective ways of saving water in your bathroom is by turning the tap off when you’re not using it.
 

Rather than running the tap and wasting water down the plughole as you brush your teeth for example, turn the tap off until you need it, and instead of turning it on all the way, only dispense as much water as you need for whatever you are doing.

Using the plug can also save considerable amounts of water. Rather than rinsing your grabby hands under a stream of running water, put the plug in and wash your hands in the sink as it’s a far more efficient way of utilising your water.

Taking a bath may seem like a relaxing way to end your day, but it can use more than twice as much water as a shower (depending on how long you stay in for). To save even more water, don’t turn the shower on and run it for long periods before climbing in and try and keep your showers short.

This will save money on heating bills as well as water.

Toilets

How much water does a typical New Zealand home use to flush their toilet? In most cases in the average Kiwi household, more than 30% of the total water usage of the home goes to flushing the toilet. More modern toilets use far less water than older models, so replacing your toilet with a newer one could be one option.

A second option is to put some type of water displacement object into the cistern. A perfect method of doing this is to fill up a plastic bottle with water and slip it into your cistern, which can save enormous amounts of water every year. It seems simple, but it really works.

Another area of your toilet that may be using copious amounts of unnecessary water is the overflow on the cistern. In modern toilet, this is diverted directly back into the bowl, but on older toilets, it runs out through an overflow on the outside of the house.

Either way is wasting water and you may need to adjust the ball-cock or float in your toilet’s cistern to remedy the problem.

You may also be wasting water if you have a leak between the cistern and the bowl.  Just a small leak here can quickly turn into thousands of litres of wasted water over a year.

The simple way to find if you have a leak is to tip some food colouring into your cistern and then see if the water in the toilet bowl changes colour. If it does so, you have a leak and you may need to change the rubber washer between the cistern and the toilet bowl inlet. This is a pretty simple task and not very expensive.

However, if this doesn’t fix the problem, you may need to call a plumber.

Kitchen

As with the bathroom, repair leaky taps and turn off the tap when you’re not using it. Rinse or wash vegetables in a sink with the plug in rather than under running water that’s just draining away. However, rinsing plates at all before putting them in the dishwasher is generally a waste of time.

Just removing the food scraps before putting them in the dishwasher is usually enough to get them clean as most modern dishwashers are more than capable of handling the remains of your last meal.

You may also find your dishwasher has an ‘eco’ cycle, which uses less water than a standard cycle.

Also, run your dishwasher only when it’s full as this is the most water-efficient cycle for it to be used on. Even if your machine has a ‘half-load’ setting, try and avoid using it where possible as it still typically uses much more than 50% of the water of a full load, even when only half empty.

This same logic should also be applied to washing machines.
 

Article Courtesy of New Zealand's Mitre 10 Projects Magazine: