Maybe you want to cut down on your water use for environmental reasons. Maybe you want to save some money on your water bill. Either way, here are three simple ways to save water in your bathroom (and save money on your water bill).
Navy Shower
Navy showers are a great way to save on your water use. What is a navy shower, you may ask? I may answer that it’s a shower where you turn on the water, get yourself all wet, then turn the water off. You then soap yourself up, scrub some shampoo into your luscious hair, and then turn on the water just enough to rinse yourself off. This uses a lot less water than a bath (average water use for a bath is 35 gallons!), and also a lot less than a normal shower (2-minute navy shower uses about 4 gallons, while a 10-minute shower uses about 20!). So go ahead and try a navy shower today.
Bottle in Your Toilet
Fill up a 2-liter bottle (or 3-liter, if it fits) with water or sand and put it in your toilet’s water tank. Each toilet flush can use about 3 gallons of water, but by using the bottle method you can cut that down by a little less than a gallon. Also, don’t go flush-crazy — about 40 percent of the water used in an average U.S. house went down the toilet.
Turn off the water when you brush your teeth
This one is simple. The average person brushes their teeth for 90 seconds, and the average faucet puts out 2 gallons a minute. So turning off the water when you brush your teeth can save almost 3 gallons of water.
There you have it. Three simple ways to save a lot of water in your bathroom. Try them out today, and if you’re not fully satisfied, we will issue a full refund. Thank you for your time.
October 14th, 2007 at 4:45 pm
The first tip (Navy Shower) is the most important because it saves on heating energy as well as water. But it can be a challenge, because it can be chilly without the hot water running, when you are wet. For a solution, check out http://www.instructables.com/id/Cozy-Low-Energy-Shower/
October 15th, 2007 at 12:20 am
Wow, that is definitely an in-depth thing to try with a shower. It’s a lot more work than just turning off the water while you soap up, but it seems like it’d be cool to use.
October 18th, 2007 at 3:17 pm
There may be a problem with Navy showers. Warm water rises. In my house, I have a shower with a circular mixing valve. Navy showers work fine there. I just shut off the water, then turn the dial back to where it was. The water temp was fine.
But I have another shower with a flow volume regulator near the shower head. When I tried using that flow regulator to shut the water off I got scalded when turning it back on. It seems the two separate mixing valves, one for cold and one for hot, were still open and the water mixing. So when I turned the flow valve back on, I got scalded because the hotter water displaced the colder.
But using the flow valve to shut off the water is still easier than using the 2 separate valves to turn the water back on, I just make sure I’m out of the way for the first 2 seconds after turning the valve back on.
October 18th, 2007 at 3:43 pm
That’s a good tip — hopefully, you will save some people from being scalded and giving up on the Navy shower forever.
October 25th, 2007 at 3:50 pm
[...] now-a-days try to help out the environment, even if it’s by doing something small, like turning off a faucet while you brush your teeth, or not littering. But for some, that is not enough. By following the handy green tips below, you [...]
April 29th, 2009 at 7:07 pm
water is cool
April 29th, 2009 at 9:04 pm
Cool as a cucumber in a bowl of hot sauce.
June 8th, 2009 at 11:54 am
PLEASE TEL ME 10 WAYS TO STOP WASTING THE WATER.
June 8th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
Just do those three ways three times each, that’ll be almost ten.
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