Simple Ways to Save Water in the Bathroom

December 1, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Turn Off Faucet While Brushing Teeth

turn off faucet

The shower, wash basin, toilet and bath tub are the fixtures that use the most amount of water in the entire household. If you want to save water and lower your water bills, it is primarily how you use these fixtures that will spell the difference between high water bills and low water bills. This is also the place where we help save the water resources of the earth. These simple ideas can mean million of gallons of water saved per year.

We always hear our parents say not to waste water when we are brushing our teeth. Turn off the faucet while we are brushing our teeth. Use a glass of water for brushing. We don’t know how much water is saved with this simple activity. We save approximately 7,300 gallons of water per year per household of 5.

How did I come up with that approximation? Most basin faucets use 1 gallon of water per minute. This is even a very conservative estimate because there are faucets that use up to 2.5 gallons of water every minute. But let’s just say that 1 gallon of water ooze out of the faucet every minute when it is on.

When we leave the faucet turned on while we are brushing our teeth, we more or less leave it for at least 2 minutes although most people brush their teeth for more minutes but let’s just say, it’s 2 minutes. For those 2 minutes of brushing while the faucet if left open, the water that comes out is 2 gallons.

Now, we don’t brush only once a day. In the house, we usually brush our teeth in the morning and in the evening before we sleep. So that will be 4 gallons of water when we brush with the faucet open in the morning and the evening.

Let’s say there are 5 of us in the household, so that 20 gallons of water wasted every day by not turning the faucet off while brushing teeth. 20 gallons of water wasted every day for the whole year is 7,300 gallons.

That’s only for one household. Let’s just say there are 1 million households with 5 members who do not turn off the faucet while brushing every morning and every evening everyday. That will be 7,300,000,000 or 7.3 billion gallons of water being wasted every year. During drought season or when the El Nino comes, this is enough to water acres of farming lands. This is enough water to prevent famine in the poorest places of the country when the dry season comes.

Small things can really add up to big things. Turn off water while brushing your teeth.

Filed Under: Everyday Green, Water Conservation Tagged With:

Water Efficient Toilet: Saving water flush after flush

November 27, 2008 By Leave a Comment

water efficient toilet
New toilets don’t have any problems with water efficiency. All toilets that are manufactured today are low flush, meaning they need only a few liters of water to flush down our urine or poop. But what will you do if you have an old toilet? Replacing it with a low-flush toilet can be costly. What can you do to reduce the water your old toilet is using?

Every time you flush, at least 6 liters of clean water is used. If you are using an old toilet, you can be using at most 4 gallons of water every flush. That’s clean water. How to save water? It’s simple. Flush only when you need to. Flush when the odor in the bathroom is unbearable. Flush after you pooped of course. But you don’t need to flush the toilet when you threw a tissue in it or if your urine is not yellowish or not smelly.

For those who have older toilets, you can reduce the quantity of water in the tank by displacing it. All you have to do is place a half-a-gallon plastic container filled with pebbles inside the tank. This way the tank will be filled with half the quantity of water as when there’s no displacement. This will be a water efficient toilet.

For most older models of toilets, this is effective. But there are others that don’t flush out all the urine or poop with a smaller amount of water. If this is the case, then it is time to upgrade to a low-flush toilet. It is costly but if you think about the savings that you will have in your water bill for years and years to come, it’s worth it.

If the water in your toilet tank is leaking, you are wasting hundreds of gallons of water every week. How to know if your toilet is leaking? Just drop some food color to the water inside the tank. Check if the water inside the bowl is colored after a few minutes. If it does, your toilet is leaking and you need to call your plumber.

I don’t know how much water is used for the toilet flushing in the Philippines but I read that almost 5 billion gallons of water is used for the flushing of toilets in the US. If the Philippines have 50 million toilets and each toilet is used 5 or more times every day, we can save a LOT if we just make sure we have water efficient toilets.

Filed Under: Everyday Green, Green Homes, Water Conservation Tagged With:

Thinking about Water

November 4, 2008 By Leave a Comment

In our place at Makati, we enjoy continuous supply of water. The building where I live has a water tank in the rooftop so water for washing and bathing are not a problem here. We also don’t have any problem with the drinking water. We buy purified water at a nearby water-refilling station.

What piques my curiosity is this thought: how come there are thousands of families here in Manila who don’t have faucets at home. They have to get out with their pails and get water from a water pump that the whole community shares.

I saw a long queue once while I was in a taxi stuck in traffic. It was a different sight for me because the people in line have different kinds of water containers with them. Do they fall in line everyday so they can have water for bath? I just find it a little ironic because Manila is surrounded with water. Heck, the whole Philippines is surrounded with water. Not to mention, the amount of water that frequent typhoon brings. There are even areas submerged in flood water the whole year. What is ironic is that there are many Filipinos who do not have clean water at home.

I have not always been a “conservation-conscious” person especially with water. Water conservation is pretty new for me. Water is just around us, it’s not like oil which is a limited resource. Besides, water is very cheap.

But the sight of the long queue of people getting water for their morning bath is a learning experience. It makes me think about my faucet in the kitchen which I always forgot to change because it was dripping. I let the water dripping for days before I was able to go to the hardware store and buy a new faucet. It made me appreciate my daily morning bath. Yeah, it made me think about the importance of water conservation.

In the Philippines, there are people who get too much and people who get nothing. It is also true with clean water.

Filed Under: Water Conservation Tagged With:
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