Wasting Water? – How To Stop Now
Everyone will know what Im talking about when I say this in fact we are all guilty of it at some point in our lives with most of us being serial offenders. You make your way innocently over to the kitchen sink for a glass of nice cool, refreshing water but the stuff coming out of the tap isnt quite up to your standards because it isnt cold enough for your liking so what do you do?, you let it run on the highest setting possible, it gushes out of the tap like a fire hydrant and then you continue to wait, and then some. While youre too busy waiting for your water to reach the optimum temperature to your satisfaction, youre unaware that perfectly fine drinkable water is just emptying down the drain.
Did you know just by doing this can actually waste up to a gallon of perfectly drinkable water at the expense of getting just one glass of cool water the way you like it? The exact opposite applies when you wait for the opportune time to plug the sink when the hot water finally kicks in to fill up the sink for your dishes.
When you crunch the numbers by the amount of people in your household, the time they spend at the sink using this method of temperature determination and multiply that number by the times in the course of each day that they perform this ritual, you come to see how substantial the water being lost is over a year. All of the small amounts add up over time to very big amounts.
It’s easy not to notice the amount of water going down the drain because you lack the awareness, and I don’t blame you. If you could just plug up that sink, you would get a better understanding as to the true amount of water being wasted.
So are there any solutions to this problem? Perhaps the addition of a small sink that would capture the excess water while you are waiting for it to reach the right temperature, could be one.
This small sink gets installed in the cabinet under your kitchen sink and becomes a containment where the water collects instead of it going right into the sewer system. This water is known as “gray water”, is relatively clean and can be recycled to water a lawn or provide indoor plant water. Even though it may contain some soapy residue or cleaning agents along with organic residue, it is going into a separate receptacle from the pipe that carries the water to the sewer.
Having this containment sink is a benefit as you always have a system in place to collect this water making it immediately available to use.
In contrast, “gray water” that is captured from washing machines, dishwashers and bathtubs, being full of chemicals and detergents must be pretreated before it can be reused. So even though you can still recycle this water, it is quite labor intensive if you want to get the best use out of it.
Remember the entire planet is covered in water but less than 1% of the earths entire water supply is drinkable so the next time you find yourself at the kitchen sink, please spare a thought for the amount of water you use and try to set a goal to reduce it. Even a little difference goes a long way.
