Droughts are cause for concern in some parts because of the low level of water supply. Water and water conservation is absolutely necessary to our survival, and with growing populations it’s straining our infrastructure and water resources to the limits. Costs for providing water to our homes and industry will escalate but so will the need to look for new resources. We can minimize those costs to ourselves (and ultimately to our environment) by carrying out a few simple water saving methods in our homes. Here are a few tips: Indoors:

1. Take shorter showers AND get a low flow showerhead. They are inexpensive to buy but get one that uses less than 2.5 gallons per minute. You won’t notice the difference in your showing enjoyment, but you will if you have low water pressure - you’ll in fact get a better shower with a low flow showerhead. Some models have a great idea! They allow you to control the flow while you suds up, then increase the water again for rinsing.

2. Turn the water off while brushing your teeth or shaving. You’ll be surprised just how much water can be wasted this way. Teach your children the same good practices.

3. Avoid flushing toilets unnecessarily. Don’t put anything except toilet waste into the toilet. Dead spiders, hair balls, cosmetic pads and other trash belong in the garbage can, not the toilet. Unfortunately toilets are responsible for a huge part of household water usage (30-40%). Which leads to the next tip …

4. Replace older toilets. The new water efficient dual flush systems available now save a huge amount of water compared to toilets 10 years old or older: The current standard full flush for solid waste is 1.6 gallons per flush - the half flush for liquid waste is .8 gallons per flush … compare this to 3.5 to 7 gallons per flush!

5. Attach aerators on all the faucets in your home. They allow air to be mixed in with the water so less water comes through the taps.

6. To adjust water temperature, turn down one tap instead of turning up the other because it uses less water and achieves the same result.

7. Collect the water that comes from hot taps While waiting for the hot water to reach you. It normally goes down the drain, but can be used for watering plants and cleaning. In areas of extreme water shortage pop a bucket in the shower to collect shower water and this can also be used on the garden.

8. Keep a jug/bottle of water in the fridge for drinking. This will save waiting for water to run cool and, if you’re on municipal water, it will reduce the chlorine content as it sits in the fridge.

9. Run washer or dishwasher when you have full loads OR adjust the water level for smaller loads. Front-load washers use about a third less water than top-loading (and less washing powder). Most also have an automatic load-to-water adjustment, and some have a suds-saver option that drains wash water into your laundry tub to be reused for another load.

10. Instead of using water with a kitchen sink disposal unit, start a compost pile in the yard with vegetable and fruit waste.

Outdoors:

1. Check for leaking taps and pipes. If you have a water meter, do a test to satisfy yourself you don’t have leaks. Read your meter then leave for a two-hour period when no water is being used. If the reading is exactly the same you can be assured you’re OK. If not you have a leak somewhere on your property that needs to be fixed.

2. Find leaks and fix. Check first for dripping faucets and replace washers where necessary. Even if taps are turned off hard, they can still drip and this is a sure sign washers are going bad. It sounds amazing but a drip rate of one drop per second wastes 1,000 liters per month (about 3,000 US gallons per year). Toilets can also leak. It’s easy to check this by putting a few drops of food coloring in the tank. The color will appears in the bowl after about half an hour if you have a leak. So replace worn parts - they’re cheap and the repairs are easily done.

3. Mulch your garden. Mulch is a layer of material spread on top of the soil to conserve moisture, discourage the growth of weeds and even out soil temperature - it can keep up to 70% more water in the soil. Beware of using green lawn clippings - they can pack down quite hard and become a barrier stopping water getting to the plants. Better to put them into the compost pile and let them break down.

4. Water less often but more deeply, and aerate the lawn with a fork for more efficient lawn care. Use drought tolerant grass.

5. Add wetting agents to your garden, lawns and tub plants to keep water (and nutrients) in the soil. Kitty litter can also be used to hold water in the soil but it does tend to stick together in lumps, so mix it in with the soil.

6. Seek information on plants that are not water hungry. Also group together plants that have the same water requirements.

7. Try to water as late or as early as possible to reduce evaporation from your garden, and using a trigger nozzle on the hose will save water.

8. Raise the lawn mower blade to at least three inches. A lawn cut higher encourages grass roots to grow deeper, shades the root system and holds soil moisture. If we practice our own water conservation methods at home we encourage our children to accept that our natural resources are in limited supply - something they’ll have to come to terms with in the future. And something our present generation too often chooses to ignore.

The British are probably unaware that Londoners use an average of 165 litres of water every day, higher than the national average of 150 litres and about one-third higher than other European cities.

These must be depressing figures for any British household, but you don t have to panic yet! By educating yourself about conserving water in simple ways, you can breathe easy and perhaps even use a hose or sprinkler to water your garden after all!

In this article, we ll debate the big question does it takes less water to take a shower or have a bath?

First of all, let s take a look at a few facts:

# A full bathtub holds approximately 140 litres of water

# Standard shower heads dispense 20-60 litres of water per minute

# Shower heads with flow restrictors dispense 10-15 litres of water per minute

An average bath requires 100 to 200 litres of water. Depending on your showerhead and whether it has a flow restrictor in it and how long you shower, the answer could oscillate either towards shower or bath. The average shower of four minutes with an old showerhead uses 80 litres of water. With a low-flow showerhead, only 40 litres of water is used.

If your house was constructed before 1992, chances are your showerheads force out about 20 litres of water per minute. Multiply this by the number of minutes you are in the shower and the litres add up fast!

If you d like to test the amount of water wasted yourself, here s an experiment you could try at home. Put the plug in the bathtub next time you take a shower (but not a stand-alone shower as you might spill over the lower shower wall). After you’ve showered, examine how much the tub filled up. If there is less water than you would usually have in a bath, then you will probably save money by taking a shower instead of a bath.

Although the chances of the contrary happening are unheard of, if it is the case for you, then in addition to the enjoyment you get in a bath, there is more good news for you.

A good, long soak in a bath can renew the spirit. Hydrotherapy, which loosely translated means rejuvenation by water, enables bathers to revitalize themselves. Some modern systems even contain air jets that have been strategically placed to target the body s pressure points, relieving tension and stress. Bathers can also enjoy the benefit of chromatherapy, which uses coloured light in much the same way aromatherapy uses scent to stimulate different psychological and physical responses.

Bath time for a young family can be an important playtime and social occasion to be shared with other family members. A number of people find baths a calming way to relax in today’s fast paced stressful life. Herbs and essential oils soothe aching muscles, tense nerves, and skin irritations; soften the skin; and ensure a good complexion.

The Environment Agency, however, would recommend short showers, not baths. Based on its latest research, it proclaims that a 5-minute shower uses about a third of the water of a bath and can save 50 litres every time.

The time taken to take a shower is not the sole variable though. As previously mentioned, water consumed is also dependent on the type of shower you use. Power showers can use more water than a bath in less than 5 minutes! Low-flow showerheads deliver 10 litres of water or less per minute and are relatively inexpensive. Older showerheads use 20 to 30 litres of water per minute.

If you still believe that a shower cannot equal the gratification of a bath, then it is recommended to partially fill your bath in order to use less water. That option might seem better if you consider the plight of sailors aboard ships. Due to lack of fresh water aboard ships, sailors were taught to get wet, turn off the water, soap and scrub, and then briefly turn the water on to rinse. Let s hope British residents don t suffer the same fate in a few years.

On a global scale, the issues of global warming and climate change have become newsworthy, and other nations are facing the possibility of life without an unlimited supply of fresh water.

Because of this, many people are advocating waste water recycling, the use of the waste water discharge from household appliances such as toilets, washing machines and dishwashers. While it may seem a sensible thing to do on the face of it, further analysis should show up the folly of this method of water conservation.

Logic tells us that “what goes in must come out”, and grey water which comes directly from the waste pipes of the various outlets must contain bits of soap, shampoo, washing powder and every other kind of detergent. Every piece of your dirty underwear contains traces of feces and urine, which of course will be transferred from the underwear to the water in your washing machine. If you don’t use disposable diapers, the same logic will apply, but much more so, and the used water will be that much more contaminated.

If you feel that you must use this water because you hate to see it go down the drain, use it on your lawn, and not on edible vegetables or fruit. Even on lawns, the water should be spread over a wide area, but unfortunately the flexible pipes which are available for fitting to your washing machine drainpipe only have a small outlet, and will concentrate the used water over a narrow area, unless you take the time and trouble to stand there and move the end of the pipe around as the water comes out.

There are three main dangers in the use of wastewater for irrigation purposes, namely salt, sodium and microbes, with the biggest danger coming from the microbes. The salt and sodium will eventually turn your soil into a highly saline environment, and not many plants will grow in that, but that’s only a minor concern when compared with the very real danger of bugs and bacteria.

We have already seen that underwear and diapers contain lots of bugs and microbes, and once they are released into a garden situation they will thrive and reproduce rapidly. While you may think that this will not matter with a lawn, you have to think of your pets and children with bare feet walking over it, and picking up these bugs, eventually reintroducing them back into the house.

The only proper solution to the conservation of water is to put your wastewater down the drain where it belongs, and if your local authority does not have a recycling or desalination plant, to install a rainwater tank, which even in a drought should eventually fill up, unless you are living in a desert or outback environment.

In Waukesha, Wisconsin a company named Bielinshi Homes has a more conservative approach. The rain water or snow melt running off the home is send into the soil through the surrounding shrubbery and sinks into the ground water table. Using a local swale, prairie or wetland type scenario the water is recaptured and reused as ground water filtered by the soil and taken back out by use of wells. Also of importance in the use of bioswales is that it is cheaper to install than pipes or storm drains with a massive rain gutter system. Landscape maintenance is also reduced to a large degree and the water is retained in the region rather than starting its long journey to the sea.

Bielinski Homes is heavily involved in this new scheme and has over 70% of the master builders developments using this method now. Others in the new housing development business are liking what they see and are following suit. Good water retention policies will be increasingly important in the future as the demand for water continues to climb due to increased population bases. Think on this.

[tags]Conserving water in your home, house water saving tips[/tags]

The third reason may be the most admirable, but it shares something in common with the other two. They are all negatives. It’s important of course to be aware of undesirable things, but the trouble with focusing on the negative is that we’re liable to do things begrudgingly. “If only we had enough water, we could have acres of lawn”, or “I wish my garden was a tropical paradise, but they won’t let us use enough water”.

Actually, I think there is a very real design reason for dry climate gardeners to make every effort to conserve this precious resource. Let’s think of the “standard” suburban garden, with the lawn taking up most of the space, a thin strip left round the perimeter for a hedge, a flower bed, and a fruit tree or two. Considering the water needs of the grass, there’s no way that water can be conserved. But who says that a garden should look like that anyway? Whether the garden is in Ireland, Thailand or Southern California, it’s just dreadful design, if indeed the term “design” can be applied at all in these cases. I myself choose to look on the lack of water not as a liability to be regretted, but as an opportunity to break the mold, indeed to break the paradigm of the standard garden. The clich is not something to hanker after, but something to be liberated from, and we dry climate gardeners have been blessed with the incentive to stop copying, and to start designing!

So what are the basic principles on which water conserving gardening is based? Obviously, the amount of water consumed is a function of the type of plants grown and the area they take up. For instance, in a typically Mediterranean climate of say 500 mm annual rainfall, with long hot rainless summers, a lawn is going to require at the very least, 700 mm of additional water. That is 700 liters per square meter a year. Add to that fruit trees and annual flowers and we’re talking about a crazy consumption rate.

You’ve been told, no doubt, to “water by drip irrigation” or to “put on the sprinklers at night”, or to plant plants that need “less” water. These instructions should not be confused with principles, for by simply obeying them, either you won’t save significant amounts of water, or you will, and the garden will look extremely poor, unless that is, you have some systematic understanding of the subject, and are then able to apply that understanding to your garden. Here is an approach to water conserving gardening, that if applied correctly makes it possible to have a beautiful garden on the one hand, but one that consumes water within pre-determined limits on the other. These principles can be summed up by the following stages:

* Define in terms of quantity the annual water needs of each group of plants (lawn, shrubs and trees, flowers etc)

* Determine the projected water consumption of the garden. If it’s a garden to be, then the design should take this into account.

* Group plants with similar water needs together (crucial)

* Design and set up an irrigation system that supplies the required water to the plants on the one hand, but at an applied rate, which allows the soil to absorb the water, on the other. The system should allow for independent watering schedules for different plant groups.

Calculate the quantities to be applied for each separate group, and for each separate watering, and then set the irrigation controller, or timer in accordance with the amount calculated.

* The use of techniques which do indeed reduce water consumption, such as organic mulches, or collecting rain water.

For those who live in wetter places in the world you probably have never had to deal with watching plant after plant die. Having a lawn turn brown and having to mow to kept the weeds down as there is no grass left. You can’t help but be depressed. Whilst the media, politicians and others argue about whether it is the worse drought Australia has faced (on an already dry continent) or not the fact it from Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane - the main metropolitan areas - the dams just keep falling. Its not that there is no rain. Its that the rain is not falling in the dam catchment areas. What makes the situation worse it that the all the state governments have failed to invest in building new dams and water infrastructure. So now a race is on to build new pipelines and dams to fix the problem. However plain old common sense says a building a dam in a record dry is a stupid idea. You need dams built when rain is plentiful. So for awhile we might have large areas of land call ‘dams’ that are totally dry! Typical political solution.

In light of this many politicians have looked for the easy answer of using recycled water. It is true that while water from sewage can be cleaned this isn’t always 100% effective. Knowing how other government departments have recently been experienced huge problems that have been very well publicized e.g. health, the average Australian is very skeptical that they can trust a government department with being 100% safe in recycled water processes. They fear they will end up with sewage spills, leaks, missed chemicals or hormones (as experienced in London) or any number of possible stuff ups.

Desalinated water seems to be a better answer and some plants are being built. But the real truth of the matter is the only real solution is rain and lots of it in flood proportions. A couple of wayward cyclones may be the best answer. However even if the rain comes many are starting to become more water wise with better water practices at home and the installation of water tanks to catch roof runoff. Gigalitres of water are lost down the storm drains of Australian cities and this is the first place governments should be looking to answer some of the water problems. But even here the economy is not prepared with a min. three month wait to have a water tank installed.

The simple truth of the drought is this - prepare for the dry when its raining. This is a simple truth in life prepare for the hard times in the good.

The Australian Government would jump at a chance to have some industrial entrepreneurial capitalist save them from their crisis and come to the rescue, but things are so bad is it even possible? With Regards to Australia and Out Back farming, sure sounds like a good idea. Of course lets not forget the Cyclones there that might destroy such an infrastructure project; remember the Cat 5 at Darwin.

Is there an Ocean Wave Generation infrastructure design, which could take that level of pounding, as they need the water badly? Well it appears there are but a couple of ocean wave making concepts, which could in fact do the job. And the water would need to be transported too, but pipelines are expensive, yet Australia is looking for solutions so a pipeline via a Bechtel or KBR or something plus a huge ocean wave energy-making infrastructure, plus desalination plant would make sense.

Actually they need 3 of them strategically placed each with their own power grid and an overlay of a separate grids, which gives them a net-centric base to protect the system thru redundancy. With reservoirs, pipelines, power and water resources you could have something capable of handling millions of people and watering abundant farmland.

Similar to when my ancestors; Smith Family, brought water into the central valley in CA for farming or when The Chandlers brought the water in from the desert to Los Angeles. It is all doable; just look at Dubai, and other places? Look what can be done? Think of Las Vegas; that is in the middle of nowhere for sure. Hoover dam, hydro power now there is water, power and lights! It just takes a team of folks and the right capital to make it all happen. I hope this article propels thought in 2007.

We are a group of gentleman who have not turned off our minds and we work hard to tackle the dilemmas of our time. Recently, an Ohio Thinker, Clarence Shellito, considered ways that communities which had issues with water retention and/or drought might use combat these situations. His thinking was they needed a low cost or no cost plan of attack and the strategy was as simple as collecting rocks;

1. Determine the effective size for a single rock pile.
2. Figure out where the rocks are.
3. Make the rocks into money (sort of).
4. Dig the underlying channels little by little and lay the terra cotta drain tiles.
5. Pile the rocks as they come in one by one, with that critical gap for condensation.
6. Watch people go nuts over having water when the rock pile is built.
7. Watch other people go crazy because the first group of people have water.

Other think tankers loved the idea for its simplicity and easy implementation and I personally have no problem with Clarence?s retention basin rock pile concept. After all this is how French Leachlines are made for gray water over flow. A great article in June 2005 of Professional Builder?s Magazine about a Wisconsin Home Builder who did this to catch the water, allow it to flow into the ground water without wasting it, proved that it works even on a small individual household scale.

The water came right off the house’s rain gutters into this simple system, just like you describe. Perfect to prevent droughts and catch run off. Rather than let it flow away and then need it come summer. This could be done for entire villiages, towns, cities or impoverished nations.

Usually the most adaptable plants are the ones that are indigenous anyways. If you live in a zone that is suffering a water crisis, usually the only plants that survive are the ones that have been there all along. This is because they are used to the conditions and know how to survive. Just take a drive through the undeveloped regions of your city, and look at what trees are green. Find out their names, and buy them. They might not be the most attractive trees, but you rarely have to make any modifications to your soil to get them to grow.

A Scotch Pine will grow almost anywhere without using much water. Not only does it grow at a very fast rate of 20 or more inches per year, it is hardy and drought tolerant. It usually grows between 25 and 35 feet, and it extremely easy to get started. Most nurseries sell these trees, especially in areas with lower amounts of water. There are many varieties available. Many fade to a yellowish brown color during the colder months, and this is usually what causes some people to dislike them and others to love them. However, there are varieties available that do not do this.

The Rocky Mountain Juniper is an extremely hardy and easy to grow tree. Its bark also turns a browner color during the winter, and rejuvenates in late spring. They are frequently used as windbreaks because of how tough they are. These trees are also great if you are trying to attract different varieties of birds to your yard. They provide great branches to nest in. Unfortunately the Rocky Mountain Juniper doesn?t grow as fast as other hardy plants like it. The rate is less than 10 inches per year.

Another one of the most popular drought resistant trees is the Russian Olive. This tree is impressive and will definitely turn some heads once it is fully grown. It is more decorative than the trees mentioned above, and will reach 20 or 25 feet once it is fully grown. They are able to grow in almost any soil, and attract birds with the berries they produce.

As you can see, there are many options for you if your water is limited. There are many others that I have not mentioned, and depending on your area you may be able to find a preferable variety. Do a Google search for hardy plants that will survive in Phoenix, and you should be presented with a large list. If you can?t find that list, just go outside and see what is currently flourishing. That is the best indication of what you should buy.

Many businesses are also impacted by water shortages such as car washes and it is an issue that has been plaguing the industry for some time. Most car washes recycle a good portion of their water, but generally they still use between 12 and 20 fresh gallons of water per car in a full-service car wash. Even self-serve car washes use between five and 8 gallons per car washed. Granted this is a lot less than someone might use if they wash their car in their driveway, but in Level 3 Drought sometimes that is even too much.

In many cities in Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, California and Texas the issues with droughts is beginning to scare many carwash owners some realize or maybe a time when they have to shut down. Meanwhile, as fresh water supplies get short the price also increases and then come the water restrictions.

If the carwash can only use half of its normal amount of water and it has to pay twice as much for it then it cannot clean the cars very well and it has to raise the price of the carwash for the customer and then the customers stop coming one day. It is a serious issue and car washes are not alone.

Consider if you will landscapers, pool contractors and so many other industries, which use water. There is an economic factor to droughts and it is his serious environmental issue. We need a water conservation program in this country and everyone must do their part. Please consider all this in 2007.