MY LIL GREEN DRESS

Save Water

A big part of green living comes from conserving resources wherever you can. I’m constantly on the look out for new ways to conserve things like electricity and water. Whether or not you pay a monthly water bill, doing whatever you can to save water is important and the right thing to do.

Here are 10 things you can do to save water today:

1. One of the easiest and best things you can do is to install aerators on all of your faucets. Aerators are super cheap and will help to reduce the flow of water when you have your faucets turned on.

2. Turn off the water when brushing your teeth and teach your kids to do the same. We waste many gallons of water each day simply by allowing the water to run while brushing teeth.

3. Do you find half full glasses of water all over the house every day? I have kids and they are constantly drinking water and then leaving it lay around. Don’t dump that water down the drain – instead use it to water house plants.

4. While waiting for your shower to warm up, put a bucket of water under the flow. When you are done using the shower, use that water on your house plants.

5. Don’t clean vegetables under running water. Instead, use a container with water to clean them and turn the water on and off only to rinse.

6. Plan your meals ahead of time and take meat from the freezer to thaw early enough that you won’t be thawing at the last minute under running water.

7. Only run your dishwasher when it’s full. You’ll use the same amount of water no matter what the load size, so wash full loads only.

8. Buy this nifty Shower Timer for your kids. Buy one for yourself too! It’s a great reminder to get out of the shower after 5 minutes.

9. Speaking of the shower, if you really want to be green, turn off the shower while you lather up and wash your hair and then turn it back on to rinse.

10. Start composting. Composting saves water on two levels. First, composting keeps food out of your disposal – which means that you’ll use less water in your kitchen sink. Second, plants that are given a layer of compost have better water retention, so you’ll have to water them less. This Compost Pail offers a great place to store compost before bringing it to your compost pile and has charcoal filters that eliminate odor. To learn more about how to compost, visit Green Living Made Easy.

There are many, many more ways to conserve water – many of which are free or very cheap, and others that you may want to consider when remodeling – like low flow toilets and shower heads. I’ll be talking more about those later, so please stop back to get more tips and ideas. Sign up for our RSS feeds if you’d like email notification when we add additional information.

And, as always, if you are doing something really cool to save water or be more green, please share your ideas. We love to learn from others.