my water wasting ways...

I felt inspired by a post on Towards Sustainability to go to http://www.savewater.com.au/ and see what initiatives I could try around the house to reduce my water usage.

Here's what i came up with:

- When washing dishes by hand, don’t rinse them under a running tap. If you have two sinks, fill the second one with rinsing water. I must admit I rinse my dishes under a running tap because I feel like the dishes don't get clean enough if they're rinsing in water where other dishes have been rinsed. Very anal retentive. I'm going to try and switch to rinsing in the sink though.

- Catch running water whilst waiting for it to warm up. Use it to water plants, rinse dishes or wash fruit and vegetables. I want to try this with both the kitchen and the bathroom. I'll let you know how it goes.

- Wash with a full load and you'll save 10 litres of water each wash. I do fill up the load usually, but sometimes with the delicates wash I normally only have a few things in there. I can probably work on washing more things together...

- Use a shower timer. Choose from a manual 4-minute egg timer or a more sophisticated electronic timer. I've worked on timing my showers by setting an alarm on my phone, but this is getting annoying and a shower timer would be handy. It's on my list of things to buy.

- Shave your legs before taking a shower. Use running shower water to rinse off. Hmmm that's a nifty idea! I'll try this one next time I need to shave my legs.

Awesome. A lot of the other stuff on the site doesn't apply, as I don't have a garden to speak of, a garage, a pool, a dishwasher, etc. But there was still heaps for me to work on. Must remember to recommend that site to friends and family.