The Bathroom

We said it before but it bears repeating: about 75% of the water
we use in our homes is used in the bathroom. This can be true
in some surprising ways.

For instance,
• If you leave the water running while you're brushing your
teeth, you’re wasting 3 to 5 gallons of water every
minute it's on.
• If you shave with the water running, you're using about
10 to 20 gallons each time.
Some simple solutions:
• Brushing your teeth – wet and rinse your brush to use
only half a gallon of water.
• Shaving – if you fill up the basin, you use a gallon of
water, that's a savings of 14 gallons each time you shave.

Showers
If a family of four takes five-minute showers each day, they
will use more than 700 gallons of water every week – that's
a three-year supply of drinking water for one person.

A long hot shower is a luxury a lot of us do not want to give
up. But there's a way around that. With a low flow
showerhead you can reduce water use by 50%. Showers
usually account for 32% of home water use, so by replacing
the showerhead, you’re saving 16% of total water usage in
your home. Easy fix, right?

Toilets
A real shocker here: 40% of the pure water used in your
house is flushed down the toilet. But you can quickly and
easily reduce that amount by 15% to 40%.

The cheapest and simplest way to do this is with a
displacement device. You put it in the toilet tank, and it
reduces the amount of water the toilet tank can hold. It can
cut your annual water usage by thousands of gallons, it
won't interfere with the flush at all, and you'll never notice
it's there. Don't use a brick for this because small pieces can
break off and damage your tank.

Here's how you do it:
• Put a plastic bottle in your toilet tank (a juice bottle or
dishwashing soap bottle or a soft drink bottle will work
fine.)
• Soap off the label, fill the bottle with water, and place it
in the tank. You can weigh it down with a few stones
inside the bottle.
• Don't let the bottle interfere with the flushing
mechanism.
• You might want to experiment with different sizes.
Different toilets need different amounts of water to
maintain the proper pressure for a successful flush. Your
savings is 1 to 2 gallons per flush.

You can also put a displacement bag in your toilet tank.
These are airbags specifically designed to displace toilet
tank water. You just fill one with water and hang it on the
inside of the tank. Some utilities give these out for free. You
can also purchase them at plumbing supply and hardware
stores. Your savings is 1 to 2 gallons per flush.

You can also install a toilet dam. It's a device that artificially
makes your tank smaller. They're available at hardware and
plumbing stores. Your savings would be 1 gallon of water
per flush.

If the average toilets is flushed 8 times a day, that's a
savings of 8 to 16 gallons every day and 2900 to 5800
gallons a year.