Comment by johnisgood
6 months ago
From the website:
HOW TO SAVE WATER AT HOME
Install a rain butt to collect rainwater to use in the garden.
Fix a leaking toilet – leaky loos can waste 200-400 litres a day.
Use water from the kitchen to water your plants.
Avoid watering your lawn – brown grass will grow back healthy.
Turn off the taps when brushing teeth or shaving.
Take shorter showers.
Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems.
How effective those measures would be?
(I do not understand the down-votes, it is a great way to hear other people's opinion(s). Is that so bad?)
> Fix a leaking toilet – leaky loos can waste 200-400 litres a day.
I suspect this one dwarfs the others. It's why some water companies have campaigned to ban new dual flush toilets in the UK (there's a common failure mode for dual flush toilets which results in the tap to the cistern not properly switching off once it's full).
Ironically, dual flush toilets are supposed to be a water saving measure.
Have you ever actually pressed the smaller flush button?
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> Install a rain butt to collect rainwater to use in the garden.
This assumes water is inconsistent. Once the rain butt is full, there's no more benefit. And then in a long dry season once it's emptied, it's not saving any more.
> Fix a leaking toilet – leaky loos can waste 200-400 litres a day.
If you're on a water meter you're already incentivised to fix this - so a better answer is water meters.
> Use water from the kitchen to water your plants.
Assuming you're using waste water, which most people won't.
> Avoid watering your lawn – brown grass will grow back healthy.
Households with lawns are rarer than they used to be - a big red flag has always been that hosepipe bans never applies to golf courses which use a large amount of water to keep their grass green all year.
> Turn off the taps when brushing teeth or shaving.
A few minutes of water p/person per day.
> Take shorter showers.
Probably minimal and potentially a hygiene problem.
> Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems.
Negligible at best.
I agree. Apparently the UK average daily water usage is ~140l, so "fix leaks" dwarfs all the others.
If you're irrigating your garden, that's also going to be a big one, but quite often you get a hosepipe ban in the dry season anyway.
Someone with a water meter should try these measures and see if they notice a difference; I bet they don't. The data center one is of course unmeasureable by the individual.
Gardens? Gardens that often cool their environments?
Tennis courts: during one of the last droughts the local tennis club kept watering their courts -- sand. The upper class twits give a F* about preserving water. Why should anybody let their plants die for those f*ers who waste it big times?
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> Assuming you're using waste water, which most people won't.
My household (in the US) uses water from cooking rice to water plants, but I cannot imagine many UK households cook rice to be able to do that.
How? When I use water to cook rice, the rice absorbs that water. That's kind of how you know it's done. How much water are you using when cooking rice that there's some left over to use in the plants?
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Not effective at all. In most countries, residential water use is literally a drop in the bucket compared to agricultural and industrial use. Sure consumers should all do our part and not wantonly waste water, but ultimately the only way to save a significant amount of water will be to raise the prices paid by large customers.
There is one thing that will get people to save water and that is raise the price.
With the exception of the asinine piece of advice at the end, given that such advice likely has around for decades, I cannot imagine it being very effective anymore as the measures suggested should already be in effect.
I would have speculated that they are imagining savings opportunities that do not exist, but the “delete emails” advice gives clear evidence that they are imagining savings opportunities that do not exist, so there is no need for speculation.