Green Remodel Forum

A friend of mine uses a bucket to catch the cold water before shower. I think it is a very good idea to save water. I will do the same although it is a little troublesome. I wonder, with the advanced technology, there must be something out there to make conserving water easier.

Yes, there is such device called recirculation pump. You may get it from the hardware store. It is very easy and no need to cut holes in the wall. Just install the device underneath the sink. When you need hot water, just press the button. The device pumps the cold water back to the water tank. When it reaches to certain temperature it turns off by itself. The hot water is waiting for you. You save time and water and is well worth it. You may have the control in the bathroom or by your bed.

Since 50% of water use in homes is for outdoor landscaping, you may want to install graywater system to bring graywater from the bathroom and laundry for landscaping use. You can install it yourself by ordering the kit online or hire someone to do it.

What about rain water harvesting? Using rain barrels to catch rain water is easy. It can be used for landscaping or flushing toilets and reduce using precious drinking water.

Yes. You can install graywater and rain water harvesting and you can save a lot of water. I like graywater more because everybody has graywater every day. The plumbing work may be simpler. For rain water harvesting, we don't have rain water every day and you need lots of barrels to collect the water.

I think it would be great if you can do both or do one at a time. Every little bit helps from depleting water from our reservoirs. In California, because of the population growth we use 10% more water than it can replace. We all need to conserve water. Every drop counts.

And droughts are everywhere. Mississippi and the southern part of the states are having droughts with flood. With the snow melt and record rain in April, Mississippi River is over float and have to open the spillway to farmlands and rural areas to prevent flooding in New Orleans. The damages was expected to be $4 billions. Fortunately or unfortunately, because they did not have rain for the past 2-3 weeks like they normally do (they call it a drought) the flood is not as damaging as expected. A drought with a flood at the same time, is this climate change?!!

There are many ways to save water in and around the house.

• Install water conserving appliances - EnergyStar
  WaterSense rated, they use much less water than the old and
  conventional ones.


• Install water conserving fixtures & systems - Toitlets,
  faucets, showerheads, and on-demand hot water recirculation pump


• Install native garden with 3" - 4" mulch and/or
  minimize lawn -  It can reduce water usage by 50% and maintenance
  by 20%.


• After taking the above measure and if you want to save some more,


• Install Rainwater Harvesting system - Less pumping work but only
  collect rainwater when it rains.


• Install graywater system - Needs pumping work but you get
  graywater everyday.

I know people who bought 10 rainwater harvesting containers (made of plastic) and put them under the deck. The containers may hold two thousand gallons of water for the landscaping when the dry season comes. The rain water probably only last for two weeks for the thirsty garden in the summer. And the containers would just sit there waiting for the winter rain to fill them up again. I am not sure this is green when 10 big plastic containers shipping from far away and being used only a short period of time within a year.

We can't expect we can collect enough water for the whole drying season. It is just helping out the reservoir from drying out too fast

The embodied energy is difficult to calculate for now. Adding a product with a carbon footprint label is a complex and costly process. However, some companies are doing it. In 2007 Britain started selling products with carbon footprint labels which include tracing back their ingredients, manufacturing and transportation processes. Now, the U.S. and many other countries are producing carbon footprint labels as well. While they were analyzing all the processes of their products, they discovered that they can sometimes make small changes and save time, energy and money. It will take many many years to have all the products carbon footprint labeled. We just have to be patient.