Most households use more water than they should on a day-to-day basis. And that adds up to higher water bills on a month-to-month basis. Some of this water waste comes from bad habits (such as running the faucet while brushing your teeth rather than shutting the faucet off until you need it). Others are plumbing concerns that will require some assistance from your favorite local plumbing contractors—which we hope is us! If we’re not yet, we’ll soon be your favorite after you call for professional plumbing in Williston, VT.
Below is a list of smart ways to conserve water over this summer. Make a few simple changes and call us for anything more extensive.
Have professional leak detection performed
We put this first because hidden leaks are the biggest source of water waste in homes—and because they’re hidden, they’re hard to even know about. If you have water bills that seem far higher than normal, no matter what your water-use habits are, we strongly advise you call us for leak detection. You may be losing hundreds of gallons a year to these hidden leaks, and they’ll also cause water damage. Even if you don’t notice serious water waste, consider scheduling leak detection every five years or so as a useful precaution.
Use your dishwasher
This often surprises people, but the dishwasher consumes less water to clean kitchenware than cleaning the same kitchenware by hand. You can use 27 gallons to handwash those dishes, while an ENERGY STAR-labeled dishwasher only uses 3 gallons. Just make sure you always run the dishwasher with a full load.
Stop dripping faucets
Dripping shower heads and bathrooms and kitchen faucets may seem like a minor inconvenience (unless the drip-drip-drip is keeping you up at night). But they accumulate waste, and even a faucet that drips once a minute will waste hundreds of gallons—the equivalent of 40 showers—over a year. Tighten the faucets or replace their washers. If you can’t fix the problem, call a plumber to see if the fixture needs to be fixed.
Install low-flow fixtures
If your household is great at saving water with smart habits, but you would still like to conserve more, look into having low-flow toilets, shower heads, faucets, laundry machines, and dishwashers installed. Special WaterSense-labeled fixtures will cut down water use significantly. A low-flow toilet alone cuts down on the old toilet’s water-usage by 50%. Ask our plumbers about the options you have for low-flow fixtures in your house.
Shorten those showers
No matter if you have a low-flow shower head in your shower, shorten your shower time to 5 minutes. Just taking off two minutes of your current shower time means saving around 1,750 gallons per year. And that’s per person, so make sure everyone in your home knows to keep shower time to a minimum.
Water the yard during cool times
When watering your yard, avoid the hottest times of the day, since much of the water will evaporate. Water it in the morning or in the evening and you’ll give the water more time to stay in the soil—and you won’t need to use nearly as much water over the summer.
Red Rock Mechanical, LLC serves Northwest Vermont and Northeast New York. Schedule quality plumbing with our team.
