Past Tense

A typical American home uses approximately one-hundred gallons of water per day, and according to the 2007 census, there are over one-hundred and eleven million households in the U.S. So, making some of the smallest changes to your own plumbing system can not only save you money now, but a potentially significant amount of money over time. And if everyone made these changes it would make a huge positive impact on the environment.

You can use a water filtering system in your home to purify enough water to fill more than three-thousand disposable plastic water bottles every year. You would save money by not paying the store mark up on bottled water (and you would know for sure where the water was coming from). A by-product of crude oil is used to produce disposable water bottles, every year more than sixteen million barrels of oil are used in the creation of all of the bottles used in the U.S. By reducing the number of bottles we throw away, we reduce our dependence on crude oil.

Greywater or graywater systems collect and filter the water used by faucets, dishwashers, and washing machines. But instead of that water going down the drain, it’s reused for non-drinking water purposes like watering your plants. This kind of recycling also keeps your soil well irrigated by diverting water into it instead of into your local sewage system.

Graywater (or greywater) systems: A safe and easy way to collect and filter the water used by faucets, dishwashers, and washing machines, and reuse it for non-potable (non-drinking water) purposes –cutting back on your home’s water consumption. The system recycles water, to water plants for example, reducing your use of fresh, potable water. It also cuts down the amount of water going into your community’s sewage system instead of the soil.

A home water filtering system can purify enough water to fill more than three-thousand of the plastic water bottles thrown away every year, you can save a lot of money by not paying the mark-up on store bought water. By reducing the use of these disposable bottles, we also reduce our dependency on crude oil, whose by-product is used to create plastic water bottles. Every year, about seventeen million barrels of oil are used to supply Americans with all the plastic water bottles they use.

When leaky pipes can’t be repaired because of too many pinhole leaks or another systemic problem, what can you do? Traditionally the solution has been to replace your plumbing system -to repipe, but that means cutting walls open and tearing out pipes. So not only are you throwing away the old pipes and the drywall that had to be removed to get at them, but then you need to replace them with new pipes and drywall. Manufacturing these new materials has an environmental impact.

But by far, the least-expensive, quickest, and best overall changes you can make to your plumbing system are adding low-flow shower heads, toilets, and faucet aerators. It’s possible for these to reduce your home water use by up to fifty-percent. Additionally, by reducing your water usage, you’re reducing the amount of water that you heat -cutting the energy use of your hot water heater by up to half.