How to save money on water bills at the same time as saving the environment by reducing water use ....

Water Use Down 65%

Cost Down 35%

Tip Of The Day: Repair dripping taps

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. After several years of reductions in water use we reached the point where the scope for saving without major investment became more and more limited all the time in our original house. Since moving in November 2009 we haven't yet done much work in this area and we are not currently on a water meter. Work starts on saving water towards the end of summer 2010.

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 we haven't investigated in any detail. The savings quoted at the top of this page all refer to our original house and are relative to our 2003 bills.

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 bigger 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 from JSutils and use for personal non commercial use.