Shower with a bucket for 4 minutes

November 21, 2008 · Filed under Environment, water

I was standing in the shower this morning day dreaming away when it hit me that I am was probably wasting loads of water and that my shower routine was something I should consider changing.

So I did a little research and found out that showering is the greatest consumer of water in the average Australian home (using on average 29% of all household water consumption). Go to www.savewater.com.au for more info

water-pie-chartI live in a rental so I am not at liberty to go changing over the shower heads. I need to check this out with my other three flatmates first. But for the record retro shower heads use about 20 litres of water per minute and AAA rated use 11 litres of water per minute.

So first thing I can do is get a bucket and start capturing the cold water that I waste while my hand is just hanging out there in the water waiting for it to heat up. I have a plastic bucket at home that someone in my house does their washing in. Plus I just ordered one of these awesome pop up buckets from www.rippleproducts.com.au that will easily store in the bathroom when I am not using it. I can use this water for anything as it is still clean. I can fill up my drink bottle, leave it in the bucket for handwashing, wash the breakfast dishes with it, boil a cuppa or water the veggies. This saves me about 5 litres of water each time I shower.

I can then use another bucket to capture the water while I am in the shower. This will be grey water and I can’t use it on my veggies. I can use it on trees and the lawn or to wash my flatmates motorbike or car. You need to use this water within 24 hours because of the bacteria may reach harmful levels after that.

Given that my bucket is 9 litres I will be able to reuse and save 9 litres of water every day.

Total water saving each year is 5110 litres.

So then I thought about how long my shower is and how much water I am actually using. I think I am hanging out in the shower for about 10 minutes each day. Sometimes longer as I seem to have used it as a creative refuge when I can’t solve a problem at work or in my business. It has become the think tank. In winter I jump in the shower when I am cold and use it to warm up. Damn I am using at least 200 litres of water every day. That is 73,000 litres per year. Crap.

So the lovely people at ripple also have shower timers. I just ordered the simple old school sand timer that you turn upside down. 4 minutes seems to be the recommended shower time. I am going with it. Water usage down to 80 litres per day and 29,200 (or less because if I am honest some days in summer I don’t shower I just head straight to the beach…is that bad?)

Adding the water from my buckets to the shorter shower time I will be saving 48,910 litres of water each year.

Plus I will be saving on my water bills. Water costs $1.61 per thousand litres. So I will save about $79 each year. If my flaties get into this as well (the timer will be in there for everyone) the 4 of us could save a $316 together.

I am not so sure about the energy I will be saving by not having to heat the water I no longer use. I will do some research and get back to you on that one.

Effort required to make this change: virtually none, I ordered the bucket and timer online and they get delivered to my house. Total cost $30. Could do it for nothing if you have a bucket at home and a water proof watch.

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No more standard light blubs

November 20, 2008 · Filed under Energy, Environment

There are a total of 36 light bulbs in my house. holy crap. No wonder my last electricity bill was over $400.

This morning I replaced 30 of the light bulbs with GE ecoimagination light bulbs (I need to get a ladder to change the other 6). There are a heap of compact fluorescent light bulbs to chose from.

I chose the 15 watt eco bulb to replace my standard 75 watt bulbs.

According to GE this bulb will last 10 times as long as my traditional light bulb (10 -15 years) and will save me more than $100 over the life of the bulb. This is an American estimate based on US power pricing so for comparison sake I checked with Neco, an Australian site, and they claim that their bulbs will save $70 over the life of the bulb.

So over the next 10 years I am going to save somewhere from $2,520 to $3600 in energy costs.

Not to mention the actual energy I will be saving. GE claims that If every household in the U.S. replaced just one 100-watt incandescent light bulb with a GE compact fluorescent light bulb,
• In each year of the compact fluorescent light bulb’s life, we would reduce greenhouse gas emissions as much as keeping 1.5 million cars off the road for a year.
• Over the bulb’s lifetime, we would save enough energy to power more than 1 million U.S. homes for an entire year.

Philips has also put some great information together on their website. The table below shows Philips estimated cash and Greenhouse emissions savings over three years.

globe_saving

Basically if you don’t go out and change all your light bulbs you are a chump.

Order your lights on line at www.neco.com.au

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No more water from PET bottles

November 10, 2008 · Filed under Environment, Packaging

I realised on my recent trip to Japan that I consumed over 30 bottles of water in 2 weeks. That seems to be a whole lot of unnecessary waste and a really good part of my life to consider.

The facts:

Over 52 billion single-use PET bottles are manufactured every year based on annual sales of over 8.25 billion gallons of bottled water.

A plastic bottle can take over 450 years to degrade.

Bottled water is more expensive than fuel for the car.

100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles die every year from ingestion and/or entanglement with marine litter.

When compared to other materials like glass and metal materials, plastic polymers require greater processing to be recycled.

Worldwide, approximately 1.5 million tons of PET are collected per year for recycling.

However the vast majority of PET bottles end up as land fill, in the ocean or incinerated.

petwastesale-unit-96-06

My Action:

I am no longer going to purchase water in plastic containers. For $9.95 I have an aluminum drink bottle that means I reduce my waste, it also saves me about $65 a fortnight (30 bottles per fortnight at $2.20) and it stays cold on my rides to and from work.

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