Turn Off the Tap

Developing "Water-Consciousness"

by Rachel Dunstan Muller

My family has undertaken several “green” challenges over the past half year, but I was sure this one was going to be the hardest. It’s one thing to submit to an energy audit, or to produce less garbage, or even to go vegetarian for a month. But to ask three teenage girls to reduce the duration of their showers? That had to be a recipe for revolt!

I recently read that the average Canadian uses 343 litres of residential water per day. This places us behind only the United States in per capita water consumption. In contrast, Swedes use only 200 litres per person per day, while the French get along fine with a mere 150 litres. One hundred and fifty litres may not sound like much, but it’s still twice the amount of water experts say we need to meet our basic drinking, cooking and cleaning requirements.

“Who cares?” you’re wondering. We have tons of water here on the “wet” coast.  In truth our water sources on the Island and across southern Canada are strained. Our water tables are falling, the quality of our water is deteriorating, and our aquatic ecosystems are under stress. There are limits on how much fresh water we can draw out of a system, and we are bumping up against them. Between 1994 and 1999 one out of every four Canadian municipalities experienced water shortages due to increased consumption, drought, or infrastructure limits. And it’s only getting worse.

The more I read, the more I was convinced water conservation should be on our family’s agenda. To start, I dug out some recent water bills to see how our consumption compared to the national average. In the winter months when we weren’t irrigating anything outside, our daily water use averaged 273 imperial gallons a day. I multiplied this figure by 4.55 to get the amount in litres, and then divided by the seven people in our home to get our per person water consumption. It wasn’t as bad as I’d feared, at only 177 litres per day. But counting our one- and three-year-olds as separate people felt like cheating, so I recalculated.  Dividing by six people instead of seven, I got a per person consumption of 207 litres. Not bad by Canadian standards, but I was convinced we could do better.

It was easier than I’d expected to get my family on board. Everyone agreed to participate—as long as the challenge was voluntary and I promised not to stand outside the bathroom with my ear to the door and my eye on a stopwatch! The challenge began officially on the first of the month with a late-night water metre reading. We took another reading early in the morning before anyone flushed a toilet or turned on any faucets to see if we had any leaks in our system. The reading was the same—no leaks. But wait, that wasn’t the meter reading we’d recorded by flashlight the night before; it was the serial number. We had to lift a second cap to see the actual metre. Oops!

We repeated the exercise the next night, and confirmed that we had no detectable leaks. This was good, because even a tiny leak can add up to a lot of water over time. A dripping faucet can send 20 gallons a day down the drain, while a leaky toilet can waste 1,000 gallons or more a month. (To check for a silent toilet leak, put dye or food coloring into the tank. If color appears in the bowl without flushing, something needs to be repaired).

The next step in our challenge was to determine how we were going to conserve water. We already had a low-flow showerhead in the bathroom and an aerator on our kitchen faucet. Replacing our older toilets with new low-flow models would have produced an instant savings of about 10 litres a flush, while upgrading to a front loading washer would have saved us as much as 20 gallons per full load of laundry. But we didn’t have time to do the former or money to do the latter, so we decided to take the simplest conservation approach. We would exercise “water-consciousness,” taking shorter showers, flushing only when necessary (a significant saver with a toilet-training three-year-old in the house), and reducing the flow of water when we were rinsing dishes or anything else.

I certainly did my part. I gave up the luxury of baths, and took speed showers, turning off the water all together as I lathered my hair or shaved my legs. (Trial and error taught me how much rinsing was required to get my hair conditioner-free.) I was ultra-focused every time I turned on a tap. Just how “focused” I was became clear one night while my husband and I were watching a movie. It was a tense domestic scene in a bathroom. Tears were flowing, blood was dripping, and all I could think was, “Someone please turn off that faucet!”

But true to my word, I didn’t nag anyone else about their water use. My teenage daughters reported that they were taking shorter showers, hanging their towels to dry so they didn’t need to be laundered after every use, and turning off the tap as they brushed their teeth. Was it enough to make a difference?

I checked the meter reading at the end of the month with bated breath. The happy result: our water consumption had dropped to 200 imperial gallons a day, or 151 litres per person. Even better, we’d become comfortable with many of the changes we’d made over the month—although I still plan to take the occasional luxurious bath!

We undertook our challenge in January, but water conservation is even more critical in the summer. Perhaps we’ll do another challenge in the heat of July or August. Of course we’ll need to use some summer-specific strategies.

Looking for some water saving tips for your own family? A great place to start is www.h20conserve.org. Good luck!

Rachel Dunstan Muller is the mother of five, and a children’s author. She and her family are working at reducing their environmental impact, one area at a time.