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Water Use Down 60%,
Cost Down 30% Compared To 2003
Tip
Of The Day:
Make Sure There Are No Leaks
With the cost of water continuously rising it becomes more and
more economical to invest money to save water. As water usage is
usually used to calculate sewerage charges these reduce as well in line
with water savings. The information here is aimed at those people
on a water meter. It is worth remembering that there are many people
without a water meter who would benefit from having one fitted,
saving significant sums of money.
Every day each of us uses around 153 litres of water and this
is about 5% more than 25 years ago. It wasn't until I started
thinking about this subject in detail that I realised just how
much water we were using unnecessarily. Filling the pond from
the tap, washing cars with a hosepipe that was left running when
not in use, leaving taps on with no plug in the sink, running
the washing machine half full and indiscriminate use of a power
washer are just some of the things I spotted.
There is one source of water that is free - rainwater. Any water
conservation project should consider the use of rainwater especially
for watering the garden, store as much as you can for those dry
periods. Another source of effectively free water is recycled water,
this is an area I haven't yet investigated in any detail.
While following the simple tips will save
money, to achieve the biggest saving a structured approach works
best, this does mean monitoring your water use but the effort is
well worth it because you start to understand where you are wasting
water.
Before embarking on expensive measures to reduce costs make sure all the simple and easy to implement changes have been done, the savings obtained may make the expensive changes uneconomic since the pay back time of big changes may be longer than the expected life of the equipment.
These pages are split into two main sections:
General Information and the process I use to identify and implement
savings plus a summary of the results which are updated as information
becomes available.
To help work out the real savings or otherwise of changes try EnCalcL a water saving calculator. To find out if the savings
predicted are actually being achieved try using EnCalcLU a
calculator for checking and predicting water bills. Both of these easy to use programs are
free to download and use for personal non commercial use.
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