World Water Day: Take Action With Home Water Conservation

In 1993, the United Nations designated March 22nd as an international day of observance for countries and individuals to consider the water conservation issues that impact our lives. Think about whether some of these great water saving measures might be right for your home:

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 Conservation: Little Steps = Big Rewards

Most people don’t think twice about their water bill until they start watering their lawn in the summer.  Compared to other utilities water is very inexpensive for the end consumer compared to their natural gas bill in the winter, or their electric bill in the summer due to running the air all the time.

When it comes to our fresh water from the tap have you ever thought of just how much time, money and energy it takes to deliver that water to you?  Just running your kitchen tap for five minutes can cause your local water treatment plant to use enough energy to light a bulb for 8 hours!

Last year we decided to take a look at our water usage in our home.  First stop, faucets.  We noticed our faucets were running 2 gpm (gallons per minute) or higher.  We swapped those out with 1½ gpm aerators.  Next, the toilet. It is an older model with that runs 4 gpf (gallons per flush), but we never thought about replacing the toilet. Quite honestly, when a toilet breaks it’s usually a trip to the local hardware store and $20 later it’s fixed.

Instead of replacing we decided to give some products a try.  We used the Green Irene Fill Cycle Diverter and the Toilet Tank Bank.  I also had an adjustable flapper that I had purchased previously but never installed.  After installing these toilet items, our toilet now flushes and refills faster than I ever thought possible.

We didn’t replace the showerhead at that time; we couldn’t decide what model to go with.  The next month our water bill came and I couldn’t believe it.  With just $20 and a commitment to ourselves to use our water smarter in our home, we reduced our consumption and waste water by an entire unit!  That’s 800 gallons!  This was during non-watering months so it was probably the best data we could ask for in our test. 

This is just an example of how all the little things add up around your home. On average, over the past year our utility bills are a combined 20% lower just by implementing some Green Irene tactics on top of what we considered already “Green.”

Chris Hughes, Minneapolis, MN
Green Consultant
http://www.greenirene.com/MNgreenteam
MN.greenteam@greenirene.com

Is Your Yard Permeable?

If you poured a five-gallon pail of water into the middle of your yard, where would that water go? Would it pool up? Would it run towards the street? Ideally, if your yard has the right amount of permeability, the water would slowly soak into the ground.

Permeability refers to how quickly water moves through layers of soil, sand, and rock. For example, consider the hard-packed soil of a playground (or your back yard in a drought!). It’s nearly impervious; water runs off of it as it would from cement. At the other extreme, there is the limestone karst country of southeastern Minnesota. Water rushes down through the cracked and water-worn rock, joining the underground water supply with a minimum of filtration. Karst is highly permeable; contaminated liquids applied to the surface flow directly into the ground water.

Ideally, water seeps slowly into the ground, where it is filtered and cleaned by layers of humus, soil, sand, and gravel. Water that lands on impervious surfaces such as parking lots, roads, and large, flat roofs tends to flow directly into nearby lakes and rivers (usually via gutters and storm sewers), carrying with it a wide variety of contaminants, from motor oil to pesticides.

Between 1986 and 2000, impervious surface in the seven-county metro area increased 60 percent. The more parking lots and developments there are, the more wetlands that are filled in, and the wider our highways become, the more water runs off the land and directly into lakes, rivers, and streams without having any of its impurities removed.

To see for yourself how permeability affects water quality, visit the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum. Water from five mini-watersheds, each using different types of pavement, flows into holding ponds. You can walk by each holding pond and see the difference in water quality.

As people are becoming aware that water should seep into rather than run off of the land, gardening and construction techniques are changing. Rooftop gardens are becoming popular; they absorb rainwater that otherwise would run down drain pipes and into the storm sewer. Some businesses and homeowners are using pervious pavers instead of tar or cement for parking lots and driveways. (Remember city streets made of paving stones? They were much better for the environment!)

Some communities are building rain gardens alongside roadways instead of constructing curbing that funnels rainwater into drains that run to the river. Like wetlands, rain gardens hold and absorb large amounts of run-off, and clean the water before it gets to the river.

What can you do to prevent rain water from flowing out of your yard and down the storm sewer? We’ve talked about a rain garden, but our yard, likemost city lots, is too small. A rain garden needs to be located a certain distance away from one’s basement. However, we could shore up the soil in front of the house, where the lawn slopes down to the sidewalk. We could use mulch to keep garden soil moist, so that less water runs off during a hard rain shower.

I’d like to buy pervious pavers for our driveway. My partner says, “But we already have a permeable driveway.” It’s sad but true. Now that the city inspectors are no longer preoccupied with the hazardous sunflowers we had draped over the back fence, I’m afraid they will notice the healthy crop of weeds pushing aside disintegrating chunks of tarmac behind our garage. Rainwater hitting our driveway doesn’t run off; it sinks through those cracks and gets cleaned and filtered by layers of earth, just like it’s supposed to. But I have to say, that’s one ugly permeable surface!

Next time it rains, grab a raincoat and observe the patterns of absorption and run-off in your yard. Then start thinking of ways that you could encourage rain water to stay in your yard and be absorbed by the soil. Maybe you don’t need that solid cement patio now that the kids are grown. If your driveway is due for a facelift, how about paving stones rather than tarmac?

There are dozens of ways you can insure that rain water goes through your soil rather than directly to the storm sewer. Here are some links:

Minnesota DNR rain garden resources
Minnesota Water Gardens

Anita Doyle, Green Irene Eco-consultant
earthlygoods.minneapolis@greenirene.com
http://greenirene.com/EarthlyGoodsMinneapolis

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.