Water Conservation at Home It seems we're in for another of those drought years, and radio ads and TV spots suggest we do the obvious for conserving water around the house. Things I've heard are: Turn/leave the water off when brushing your teeth. Water your yard only after dusk, or not at all. Keep it longer (to help catch dew and retain moisture), but if it doesn't rain at all, water it once month to keep the roots alive. Be certain to run washers only when they're full. When rinsing dishes, only turn on the water when you've got an item under the flow. Fix leaking faucets. Buy all sorts of items that conserve water (efficient toilets, shower heads, clothes and dish washers, ...). Take showers instead of baths. Those are good suggestions for a start, or if you have the money to spend. But there are also very inexpensive things you can do by changing your philosophy. Try not watering your lawn at all. It'll turn brown for the summer, and it'll turn green when the rain comes back. Instead of showing off your green lawn, show off your green disposition. When washing dishes by hand, start with the smallest amount of water in the sink (or pan), and rinse items over the sink to build up your wash water. Does anyone really leave the water running while brushing their teeth? Stop that! Then there are suggestions that take some work, but result in truly great gains: Reroute your downspouts into cisterns. These can be large garbage cans. We've found two 30-gal plastic cans save a lot of water. The roof is a huge collector of water, and we found that during the drought of 1992, we almost never ran them dry. Keep a can by your clothes washer, and reroute the rinse water into the can. Use that water for the next wash cycle, or filling the toilet tank after a flush, or other grey-water purposes. Do you run the shower to let the hot water get to the shower head? Run it into a bucket. If it's a clean bucket, the water will be, too. You can use it for anything, including cooking/drinking, watering plants, etc. Do you cook pasta? Don't drain the water down the sink - cool it and use it for watering plants, or making a soup. ...and at least one that requires a tolerance and intimacy... Depending upon how "close" you are with your housemate(s), consider not flushing the toilet after each use. This requires a balance of tolerance to the disgusting, and need for sanitation. I don't think you need to go overboard (so to speak) on this one. By using the methods above, we were able to cut our water use in half during the last drought (1992). There are also indirect methods of conserving water, such as turning off lights and appliances (TV!). Learn to enjoy the dark: take up astronomy, make love, light some candles! In Washington state, most of our power is hydroelectric. By conserving electricity, the flows through the turbines don't need to be as high, thus conserving water. There are certain manufacturing processes that are large users of water, and you could try lowering your dependence on those products (paper, for instance). Alas, I have no list of such products to offer (but I'll add them if you let me know).

Hydroelectric Power Consequences Virtually all electrical power in Washington is generated by water turbines. Let's look at this in general mathematic terms, examining a company that has 500 employees with computers. The question is whether employees should turn off their computers at night. Let's assume a computer and flat panel display together require 320W of power. This times 500 employees means 160kW. If a dam is 100ft high, then it must have an extra 23.7 cubic feet (cuft) per second flow to accommodate this 160kW, which means 85,000 cuft per hour. Per week, there are about 128 non-work hours. 128hrs times 85kcuft = about 11 million cuft per week of wasted water. Multiply that times 52, and you get an annual wastage of about 567 million cuft. That's a cube 827 feet on a side, or Hicks Lake (in Lacey) down to 80 feet, or Green Lake in Seattle to 52 feet. If it doesn't sound like a lot (it does to me), consider that Green Lake is about 8 feet deep at its deepest. Those 500 computers would empty Green Lake over half a dozen times per year. Does it sound like a lot yet? While we're at it, here's a table of some household devices and the cost and water it takes to run them. I'm guessing on a lot of this, such as how long a refrigerator or water heater runs over the course of a day, but I think it's fairly reasonable. It comes out close to our electric bill at home anyway, assuming a 5 cent per kilowatt-hour charge. Approximate Costs, and Water Consumption Requirements Device Watts Used per day Cost per month Cost per year Water used monthly (cuft) Water used per year (cuft) Toaster 1500 3min $0.11 $1.37 1,214 14,569 Hair Drier 1800 5min $0.23 $2.74 2,428 29,139 Computer 320 5hrs $2.43 $29.20 25,901 310,812 Refrigerator 750 3hrs $2.28 $4.56 24,282 291,386 Lights (8@75W) 600 4hrs $3.65 $43.80 38,851 466,217 TV (one) 500 4hrs $3.04 $36.50 32,376 388,514 Coffee pot 1500 10min $0.38 $4.56 4,047 48,564 Water Heater 4500 2hrs $13.69 $164.25 145,693 1,748,315 Electric Stove 2500 30min $1.90 $22.82 20,235 242,822 Washer/dryer 2000 30min $1.52 $18.25 16,188 194,257 Totals: $29.24 $328.05 311,216 3,734,595

Using the Cistern A nice term for "tub of water". I had the fortune once of staying at a house in St. John's, Virgin Islands. The islands have no aquifers. The roofs of the houses are designed to collect rain water and train it into holding tanks. That is the water supply. We generally don't have the need for that sort of thing here, but on occasion (like now), it would be handy to have tubs around. At our house, we've resorted to two 30 gallon plastic garbage cans to catch runoff from our downspouts, a ten gallon plastic can to catch rinse water from the washing machine, and one or two buckets to haul water around. Think of it as an adventure. I built a sieve system for the downspouts. I cut a 3-inch hole in the lid of one of the cans, and used a soldering iron (and some of the cut piece for solder) and melted a wire grill to cover the hole. That stops large debris from getting into the water. Place the lid upside-down on the can, and it will act as a wide funnel. If it rains for about one hour, both cans get filled. That's from half our roof. We have a 720 square foot house. Catching water is not a challenge. Storing water takes some shepherding. Mosquitos will breed in it if you don't keep a tight lid on it, and stagnant water will foul after a while. Liquid chlorine bleach is your savior, and it doesn't take a whole lot to keep it clean. I think we used about half a cup per week per bin. And that might be overkill. Oh yeah - if you're going to use this for plants, use the water just before you add the chlorine. That way, you won't be pouring newly-chlorinated water on the plants. Stagger the treatments between cans. By tapping water from alternating cans, you can get good plant water every few days, not each week. Toilets - this is if you really want every drop to count. There are two ways to deal with this: either flush directly with a bucket of water (tricky, and the mess you might make would be horrid), or filling the tank after a proper flush. The advantage to the former method is, you can use grey water. I wouldn't put grey water into the tank. However, rain water would be okay, as is the water from when you waited for the shower to warm up. Tip - if you go the tank refill route, shut the water valve that feeds the tank. Then you can take your time to fill the tank (especially useful if you uh... forgot the bucket). That's it for the technology needed to catch rain water. No big deal.

Final Notes and Suggestions Think of water tiered by quality. Starting at the top, there's Potable water (from the faucet) Used, potable water (cooking water) Treated rain water Old rain water Grey water (soapy) Black water (sewage) Use upper level water for tasks farther down the list. Sometimes that's not so easy. For instance, you could use treated rain water for the dishes, but you'd have to heat it up somehow. But hot water used to cook the spaghetti could be dish water. Ultimately, only grey water and black water should go down the drain. If you can change your outlook on how to use water for just one summer, this would be the one to try it on. Other resources. I've been to only one web site that has water conservation suggestions. I'm sure a Google search would turn up more. This page was written to show that there is at least one crazy couple that has answered the call to conserve at least once. You can do it, too!

- Dale Gombert, 3/2005