Water You Doin'?

Just this week, Husband told me the water rates in this fair Midwestern "city of fountains" is going up and that we should try to use less water. Whether it's a money thing or a conservation thing, that is always something I can get behind.

I hate hate hate it when someone suggests "turning off the tap when I brush my teeth" as a way to save water. Duh, dummy. I actually read this suggestion from a celebrity in a magazine recently. Um, yeah, the rest of us did that 25 years ago. Also? You're rich and famous. I feel like you should try harder than that.

So here are the other, less conspicuous ways Husband and I are saving water now:

1. Cutting Husband's hair. We cut off 8-9 inches of Husband's white man 'fro--buzzed it right off. (He's going to try to sell it. I'll let you know if he's successful.) That will really cut down on shower time. As for my hair, re: short v. long, I feel like it's a wash (pun intended). When I have short hair, wash/condition time is faster and I use less shampoo/conditioner. But I use a blow drier, straightener, and product, too. When I have long hair, I usually don't even bother to blow dry it, especially in the summer.

2. Recycling. We don't have a grey water system going on, but we have a dehumidifier in the basement that runs a lot. Rather than dumping the water down the drain, we have started to use it to water plants and flowers.

3. Making our own rain barrel thing. We used to have the big oil tanks in our basement because the house used to be heated with oil. Husband and FIL got the tanks out of the tank room and sealed it, painted it, and built great storage shelves. We now have an awesome storage room/storm shelter. But enough bragging, we also ended up with two huge tanks sitting in our back yard. One went to the scrap place (it didn't really make us any money if you count the time spent cutting it open, washing it out, and transporting it to the scrap yard). The other is getting turned into a rain barrel. Husband is going to put a gutter on one side of the detached garage that will drain into the old oil tank. It already has a spigot on it so it will be great for filling up buckets to water the back garden beds.

4. Not running the rinse cycle on the dishwasher. Husband used to do this and it drove me crazy. He's stopped, thanks to the rate increase.

5. Low flow shower heads and aerators in the sinks. You don't even notice you're using less water.

6. Also those other duh, dummy ways of saving water.  Full loads of laundry, not washing a small cycle as a large cycle, etc. Also, a lot of times I'll use pasta water to make the pasta sauce or the water from steamed vegetables in the garden. Just a lot of little things. I'm sure there are lots of others I overlook from time to time, but we try.

7. I'm trying to figure out how to wash my hair less. I used to wash/condition it every time I took a shower and if I run in the evenings or push mow the yard, that's two showers a day. I've cut out the 2nd wash of the day bit, but I could probably do more than that...

Here are some things I'm interested in if we ever manage to add a bathroom to the basement or redo the upstairs bathroom:

1. Dual-flush toilets. Not the low-flow toilets because you just end up flushing them extra times. Dual flush lets you choose how much flush you need: a lot or a little. That's all I have to say about that.

2. The kind of shower where one knob controls the hot/cold on/off. Right now we have a knob for cold and a knob for hot. This makes navy showers very difficult--so difficult I don't even try. (With one knob, I'm really good at navy showers. I even used to catch the water coming out of the tub spigot while the water was warming to the right temp and reuse it for plants.) 

Things I feel that Husband would never agree to:

1. Full-on gray water recycling.

2. One of those sinks that empties into the toilet tank and then you use your sink water to flush the toilet. They delight the hippie in me.

Times that we are huge water wasters:

1. Step-daughter likes to open her backyard "water park" once a summer and have her cousins over and fill every trash can, bucket, pool, water balloon, slip & slide, sprinkler and make a general mud slick of our back yard. But you're only a kid once, right? And it's a lot more fun than going to the real water park. It delights the suburbanite in me.

Things I don't want to give up ever:

1. An occasional long hot bath. It's cheaper than therapy, dude.