Water Conservation Tips

• DON’T leave the tap running when you’re brushing your teeth.
  
  
• DO use a bucket & a hose with a shut-off nozzle to wash your car. This can save about 300 L of water.
  
  
• DON’T use the toilet as a wastebasket or flush it unnecessarily.
  
  
• DO take short showers – five minutes or less should do. If you prefer baths, fill the tub only one-quarter full.
  
  
• DON’T water your lawn in the hot sun or on a windy day. It is best to water early in the morning.
  
  
• DO keep a bottle of drinking water in the refrigerator rather than running your tap to get cold water when you want a drink. (Rinse the bottle every few days.)
  
  
• DON’T mow your lawn until your grass has reached a height of 2 ½”.

• Leaks can be costly. A leak of only one drop per second wastes about 10,000 L of water per year. Most leaks are easy to find and fix at very little cost.
  
  
• Leaking faucets are often caused by a worn out washer that costs pennies to replace. Most hardware stores will have faucet repair kits with illustrations showing how to replace a washer.
  
  
• A toilet that continues to run after flushing, if the leak is large enough, can waste up to 200,000 L of water in a single year! To find out if your toilet is leaking, put two or three drops of food colouring in the tank at the back of the toilet. Wait a few minutes. If the colour shows up in the bowl, there’s a leak.
  
  
• Toilet leaks are often due to a flush valve or flapper valve that isn’t sitting properly in the valve seat, bent or misaligned flush valve lift wires, or a corroded valve seat. All of these can be fixed easily and inexpensively.

• You can install a water-saving device inside the tank or, if the toilet is more than fifteen years old – which means it probably uses about 18 L of water or more per flush – you can replace it with an ultra-low-volume toilet.

• Conventional showerheads have flow rates up to 15 to 20 L per minute. A properly designed low-flow showerhead can reduce that flow by half and still provide proper shower performance.
• Conventional faucets have an average flow rate of 13.5 L of water per minute. Low-flow aerators will reduce this flow. In the bathroom, a flow rate of about 6 L per minute should suffice, and in the kitchen a flow rate of 6 to 9 L per minute is sufficient.

• Lawn sprinklers should be suited to the size and shape of the lawn to avoid watering driveways and sidewalks. Sprinklers that lay water down in a flat pattern are better than oscillating sprinklers which lose as much as 50% of what they disperse through evaporation.