Monitoring drought conditions

Saving water is always a smart move as a way of lowering your utility bills. However, for some places in the U.S., drought conditions make water conservation even more important as a part of efforts to preserve and protect our water supplies. Droughts are especially difficult situations for states and localities to handle, since there is often little warning before their onset, and they generally last much longer than other natural hazards like floods or hurricanes.

How can you tell if your area is undergoing a drought? The National Drought Mitigation Center posts regularly updated national drought maps searchable by region and state. The map can be found at this link: http://www.drought.unl.edu/dm/archive.html.

If you are in an area with drought conditions, consider contacting your local Eco-Consultant to learn about water conservation steps you can take, as well as about local water conservation campaigns and programs.

Water-Wise Landscaping

As populations grow and droughts occur more frequently across the country, water supplies are becoming tighter and tighter. This has prompted a closer look at landscape watering. Approximately one-half of residential water is diverted to landscape watering, and much of it is needlessly wasted. Fortunately, there are many simple steps that homeowners can take to reduce water waste and get more from the water they use.

The biggest water user in the home landscape is typically the lawn, so it is the area that offers the biggest opportunity for water savings. Here are a few suggestions:

• Reduce the size of the lawn by adding or increasing the size of planting beds, gardens, and patio areas.
• Use locally-adapted turf grasses that have lower water requirements.
• Water early in the day, when wind and evaporation losses are their lowest.
• Water deeply, with less frequency. This reduces runoff, and encourages deep-rooted, resilient grass plants.
• Water efficiently by limiting over-watering, limiting watering paved areas, and using well-maintained equipment.

The opportunities for water-savings continue beyond the edge of the grass. An increasingly popular option is planting native, or well-adapted, drought-tolerant landscape plants. And you don’t have to go for the desert look to pursue this option (although the desert look can be beautiful). There are a wide variety of plants available in most areas that can get by with little or no supplemental watering. Keeping plants healthy also helps by allowing them to be more tolerant of drought stress.

It’s also important to group the plants according to their habitat needs: dry and sunny, shady and moist, or somewhere in between. This way, you can water the plant groups that need it and avoid those that do not, allowing plants to thrive with the amount of moisture they desire.

As with lawns, water can be saved in planting beds by watering slow and deep, efficiently, and early. Low-pressure drip irrigation systems are very effective at achieving these goals, plus they help avoid disease problems plants can develop with sprinkler irrigation systems.

Another water-saving tip for landscape beds is to use mulch. Mulch, most commonly wood chips or bark, help hold the soil moisture in, plus it moderates soil temperature extremes. As the mulch decomposes, it adds organic matter to the soil, improving water penetration and holding capacity.

The ultimate in water savings is to capture it for reuse later. Options range from the simple 55 gallon drum at the base of one or more downspouts, to more involved high-capacity cistern systems. Either will help you put to good use water that otherwise would be wasted as runoff.

For the most part, these steps are not difficult or complicated. Taking these steps will allow you to have an attractive, diverse landscape on a low-water budget. If you would like more details on these or other outdoor water-saving tips, please click here to contact your local Green Irene Eco-Consultant.

What Happens to Water Going Down the Drain

Commentary: Green Irene‘s Water Conservation Kit can help you reduce water use immediately and save money at the same time. The Kit includes a calculator that will tell you exactly how much you will save from installing low-flow showerheads, aerators, and taking other water conservation techniques. In addition, you can get a Green Home Makeover to learn about additional steps that will get you on the path of going green. Act right away! Find your Local Eco-Consultant and Go GREEN today!

Last week, peer-to-peer network CurrentTV invited us to participate in their Earth Week special, where they asked their readers to pose their most burning eco-questions to a handful of savvy bloggers. We’ve been thinking a lot about the state of the world’s water lately, so this question stood out to us:

It’s always considered a major no-no to waste water. But how is water used in a household wasted? Isn’t it all just processed and reused?

I understand that there is energy spent in processing and there are possible chemical issues in the cleaning process but I’m really just interested in the whole concept of “wasting water”.

What percentage of water that goes down the drain is actually lost forever?

– Jakebot

Great question, Jake. We want to answer this question for you in two parts: simple and not so simple. First, the simple answer to your question is zero. Zero percent of water that goes down the drain is actually lost forever because, according to the law of conservation of mass, matter cannot be created or destroyed.

But what you want to know, then, is, ‘why is wasting water is such a big no-no?’ The answer to that is cost and location. In the United States, most people get their water from wells or from municipal systems. Once they’ve used it, most people send their “waste” water down the drain to either the wastewater treatment plant or to a septic system. It is costly — in terms of both money and energy — to transport water from its source to our houses, and to treat it once it leaves our houses.

Location is a big deal when it comes to water. If you live in Seattle, like we do, it’s plentiful enough that we don’t need to worry too much about wasting it because there is always enough for all of us to use as we please. But in most places, water still goes through a natural cycle — either evaporating or soaking into the ground — before being taken back into the municipal system. So in cities that suffer from drought, there is not enough water in the public system for everyone to use all they want, all the time, and it becomes even more apparent why sourcing water from a reservoir many miles from your home, and flushing it to a location just as far away, is a massive dedication of resources for a system that could be handled more locally.

The costs of operating these systems are growing every year. As Carol Steinfeld, author and founder of Ecovita told us (we asked for her input to help answer your question), “we have more people on the planet, each using more and more water, than ever before in human history.” So, to provide the basic human right of clean water for all, it becomes imperative that we get more efficient at using our water. When you think about it that way, it seems very wasteful to use clean drinking water to wash our cars water plants, or spray the sidewalks — when water re-used once, twice or even three times from relatively clean places like the shower, the sink or the washing machine, would work just as well without requiring nearly as much energy.

Making our water systems more efficient means we need to implement some of our more innovative solutions to reusing and treating our water at the source, such as the super-treatment facilities in San Diego, home rainbarrels, or even Steinfeld’s waterless toilets. If we can get better at cutting the external cost of providing clean water — treatment and transport — then we can build a system where water isn’t waste, but a resource.

Excerpted from Worldchanging.

California: Drought Emergency Declared

Perhaps you saw this article in the New York Times recently?

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency because of three years of below-average rain and snowfall, a step that urges urban water agencies to reduce water use by 20 percent. Mandatory rationing is an option if the declaration and other measures are insufficient. The drought has forced farmers to fallow their fields, put thousands of agricultural workers out of work and led to conservation measures in cities throughout the state. State agencies must now provide assistance for affected communities and businesses, and the Department of Water Resources must protect supplies.”

Those of you who live in California, or who have friends and family who live there, please take steps to reduce your family household water usage!  There are so many easy things you can do like switch to one of Green Irene’s great low-flow showerheads, install faucet aerators, put a toilet tank bank in your toilet to save over half a gallon per flush, fix leaks.

There are steps to take after that like using a rain barrel to capture rain from your downspout to use in watering your lawn, use drip irrigation or even xeriscaping to reduce water use by your outdoor plantings or even rip out your grass entirely and let us refer you to a company that installs artifical grass. No more water. No more chemicals.

Your local Green Irene Eco-Consultant can help you with all of these so you don’t have to make a hobby about of going green.  We offer gift certificates if you want to help your California friends make the switch NOW.

We are going to see drought emergencies in lots more places in the country.  May as well be prepared now!

PJ Stafford

Co-Founder

Green Irene LLC