has that ever been your face when your water bill comes? and now you’ve probably already heard that water prices in Singapore are increasing for the first time in 17 years – and we’re looking at a whopping 30% increase! think it’s perhaps time you relook into how you can lower your water consumption at home? check out these bill-reducing tips then, and save your pocket – and the earth – some unnecessary heartache.
if you have a bath, you probably want to look into swopping your weekly bath to a fortnightly one – that’s already cutting your bath-time water consumption by a good half, which is well to do considering an average bath uses 80 litres of water! another thing you could do, is share the bath! if both you and another family member want to take a bath, take it one after another – simply add a kettle full of hot water into the bath when it’s the second person’s turn, and it’s as good as “new”! (you might want to politely refrain from peeing or farting in the bath water if you’re the first person though, you know, manners and all!) and when you’re all done, leave the bath water in the bath, pop a bucket in there, and you have yourself a reservoir of water for flushing your toilet! voila! perfect reuse-reduce-recycle action right there!
cutting the twice-a-day showers down to once a day can save volumes. if you’re feeling icky before you sleep for example, try wiping yourself down with a wet hand towel instead. it might last you till your morning shower, especially if you sleep in air-conditioning.
if you still need to take frequent showers though – and we completely understand, it being sweaty summery Singapore and all – then it might be a good idea to add a big bucket to your shower stall. you don’t have to step into it, but even placing it in front of you can collect a lot of the excess water that rains down from the shower head, and also the water that gets swished off your body while you’re cleaning yourself. you can use the water either to flush your toilet, or you can even use it later to clean your shower stall or walls. double duty and it was as easy as sho-wer-ing!
and, especially if you use bio-friendly body wash, you can even use this water saved to water your plants!
most toilets these days have a full-flush and half-flush option, and needless to say, you save more water using the half-flush as much as possible. but did you know, you can further reduce the amount of water you use per flush, simply by placing an added mass into your water cistern? bet you wondered why your mother used to put a brick in there! yep, that brick actually takes up that much volume which otherwise would have been filled by water. thus, you’re essentially saving a brick-worth of water per flush! how ingenious and effortless is that! remember too, that houses are made of bricks… so if you save enough “bricks” of water, you could be saving an entire “house” of water in the long run! (they do say that literally using a brick could release loose sediments into your pipes, so instead, fill an empty plastic bottle with sand or pebbles or even water and drop that in, capped tightly of course!)
you don’t have to be molly weasley to be able to get dishes to do themselves. well, it’s not really magic, but if you use the right ultra grease-fighting dish cleaning liquid, and leave your stubbornly-stuck dishes to soak in it, you’ll save yourself a lot of effort and a whole lot of water that would otherwise be running whilst you’re scrubbing. you can also attach a low-flow aerator to your sink faucets, and save even more unnecessary water waste. if you have a dishwasher (yay!) always be sure to run it only once it’s full. those half-loads can run you up gallons and gallons of water! (psst! did you know that a gallon by UK standards is about 4.5 litres!)
remember the days your mum hauled out a huge bucket and she’d wring that mop head so hard, and you stared into all that icky black water and swore you’d never want to do that? thanks to advanced technology, you never have to look back on those dark days again. believe it or not, there’s actually a revolutionary little thing called squirt + mop where you squirt just a trickle of floor cleaning liquid directly on the floor (think laminate flooring, tile and sealed stone) and with a cloth or mop, simply get rid of the dirt completely. no kidding! yeah, not just lazily moved to another part of your floor – like gone, vamush, poof, bye bye dirt, be done with you! no mixing the detergent into water, no slushing water all around, no rinsing afterward because it’s non-toxic – think about how much money you’ll be saving on water! hurrah! fear no water bill no more!
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