Turn Off Faucet While Brushing Teeth
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.
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