If you don't already have them, simply by installing a faucet aerator on your kitchen and bathroom sinks can save $50 a year for a typical family of three and a significant amount of water. If you can reduce the amount of water you use while washing dishes, brushing your teeth and shaving, these costs can grow even more.
A faucet aerator adds air to the water, providing the same amount of water pressure as you had before, and you won't notice that less actual water is running. To determine whether you have aerators installed on your home sinks, simply look at where water flows out of your faucet: an aerator screws into the faucet and if you look closely, will usually display "GPM" (gallons per minute) information as well.
What You Should Know
- A typical sink faucet uses 3 to 4 gallons of water per minute, although federal guidelines require any faucets made after 1994 to have a maximum flow rate of 2.2 gallons per minute. A faucet aerator can reduce this to 0.5 gallons per minute! In other words, rinsing dishes for five minutes with a faucet aerator as opposed to an older faucet can save you up to 17.5 gallons of water!
- A laminar faucet, which sprays the water through many parallel streams instead of the whole faucet opening, greatly reduces water usage at your sink while rinsing just as forcefully.
- Letting hot water run without using it is one of the worst ways you can waste energy. So turn off the water while brushing your teeth or washing dishes. If shaving, plug and fill up the sink with water instead of letting it run continuously.
- If only 3% of American households had one leaky faucet for one month, they would send 95 million gallons of water down the drain--that's enough to provide a year's supply of drinking water to 400,000 people.
Easy Things You Can Do
- Install faucet aerators on all of your sinks. An aerator mixes air into the water, resulting in a powerful stream that uses less water. They're two to five dollars each, and you can find them at your local hardware store. And they're easy to install, just screw them on.
- For the bathroom sink, get an aerator that flows at 0.5 to 1.0 gallons per minute.
- For the kitchen sink, you'll need a bit more pressure so get one that flows at 2 gallons per minute. If you wash dishes by hand, be sure to purchase an aerator with a shutoff valve.
- For the bathroom sink, get an aerator that flows at 0.5 to 1.0 gallons per minute.
- Fix leaky faucets. A leak of just one drip every three seconds wastes 30 gallons of water a month! Finding your wrench and tightening the leak takes only five minutes.
- Get a free water conservation kit from Redwood City or Santa Clara County.
- Receive rebates and free water-saving plumbing fixtures from California Water Service Company.
Source: You Can Prevent Global Warming: 52 Easy Ways (Jeffrey Langholz, PhD, and Kelly Turner)