Saving water: useful tips for a green life
Usually this topic is addressed during the holidays when it is hot and there is danger of drought, but this time we offer you some ideas and technological innovations to reduce water consumption, not only in summer but at any time of the year. Come rain or shine – let’s protect this precious resource! Below you will find some ideas for not wasting water.
Less water in the bathroom
In this room water is used continuously: for cooking, cleaning, washing dishes. But there are many opportunities to reduce consumption, for example:
- Wash fruit and vegetables in a container, not under running water.
- Then use the wash water to water the plants. Did you know? Even cooking water can be reused in the garden, but be careful: only if it has not been salted.
- Don’t wash dishes by hand: the dishwasher uses 3 times less water!
- Choose energy-saving dishwashers and washing machines and always use them with a full load.
- Thaw the meat slowly in the refrigerator, not under running water. And if you can, it’s a good habit to give up meat every now and then: its production requires enormous quantities of water.
No more wasting water in the kitchen
Many liters of water are consumed in the bathroom, even just to clean it. We should all develop good habits and pass them on to our family members too. How to best manage water resources? Here are some useful tips for limiting water consumption in the bathroom through simple daily gestures.
- Did you know? The biggest waste of water in the house comes from the toilet! The toilet is not a rubbish bin. Every time you flush the toilet, you consume water: towels and cotton should always be thrown in the garbage.
- To wash yourself, a good practice is to prefer a quick shower to the bathtub. This way your water consumption will be reduced by 60% per year.
- It seems obvious but it isn’t: always check that there are no leaks from the sanitary ware. A leaky tap wastes around 6000 liters of water per year.
- Maintenance of the pipes is essential, but washing and cleaning limescale deposits often means consuming a lot of water – a domestic water softener allows you to significantly reduce this waste!
- Turn off the tap while shaving or brushing your teeth. If you don’t do this you waste around 9 liters of water per minute!
- Choose a tap with a flow reducer and which offers the possibility to choose between a flush water jet and a more powerful jet.
Good practices for saving water in the garden
In spring, a well-kept garden of around 50 square meters requires on average around 1000 liters of water per day! Larger gardens, with an area of around 300 square metres, consume around 360 thousand liters per year. It’s more or less like you bathe non-stop for a whole week. How to limit this waste?
- The first tip is to choose plants that require less intensive treatment and that are better suited to the climate you live in.
- Place plants that don’t require a lot of water on slopes and water-loving plants in areas where it accumulates more and where it stays longer.
- Add organic material to the soil that prevents evaporation, such as compost or expanded clay.
Collect rainwater for irrigation: you will save running water and do your plants some good! - Water slowly, abundantly but less frequently, rather than quickly, superficially and too often.
- Give water early in the morning or late in the evening, so that the water does not evaporate in the sun within a few hours.
To save water at home, choose intelligent solutions
We are human and sometimes we can forget about running water while brushing our teeth. And it is possible not to notice a leak. It’s difficult to stay on guard at all times. It is at this point that technology comes to our aid to help us save water in a smart way. There are solutions that warn of excessive or unusual water consumption. At our disposal we have, for example:
- Applications that monitor water consumption, summarize it in the form of statistics and graphs and send an alert when they detect an anomaly. An example of a device that works like this is the WiFi module of water softeners.
- Self-flushing toilets, with water distribution in different directions.
- Electronic batteries, which act like photocells and allow water to come out of the tap only when the sensor registers movements.
- Taps that heat water immediately.
Although we often forget it, the availability of water in the world is not an unlimited resource. Implementing new habits to avoid household waste is a small sacrifice, but a great benefit for the entire planet and for future generations. Let’s not waste water: let’s save it!
