Reducing your home water use

The guideline is that if you have fewer people in your house than bedrooms, you will generally save money by getting a water meter rather than paying for an unmetered supply. This will also allow you to monitor your use and start to see how you can reduce it, saving you even more money.

Whilst reducing your water use will not save you the most money and carbon emissions, it does take energy to treat water to drinking quality standard, and pump it to homes - most of which we don't use for drinking anyway.

Water Saving in the Home

Some ideas for saving water are given on the Advice for Individuals page.  But for much more information about saving water in the home, Yorkshire Water have a water saving web page with a tool to identify potential savings, and are currently giving away free water-saving kits for the home.

Also see the Water page at DirectGov. This How to Save Water - Top Tips page highlights how much water standard household activities use, and again gives tips on how to reduce use. It misses out power showers, which can use as much water as a bath in 5 minutes, so if you have a power shower, keep your use to below 3 minutes (or you may as well enjoy a relaxing bath)!

Water Saving in the Garden

It will save energy if you can use rainwater - or even re-used water from other uses - for non drinking purposes such as watering the garden or houseplants, washing the car, topping up the pond etc. Having your own supply of water will also leave more in the rivers in times of drought, helping to preserve local wildlife. In times of sudden downpours, it will reduce the amount of water flowing into the drains so helping to reduce flash flooding. Most plants and pond animals don't like the chlorine in tap water anyway, so they will be happier if you use non-treated water too.

As the weather gets more variable,and more people are conscious of their water use to reduce costs of metered water, many people ask about water butts for their gardens. The Council has a fixed price deal through York & North Yorkshire Waste Partnership Get Composting for water butts (they also provide our compost bins). However, this price is not subsidised so we would also recommend checking with your water company, local garden centres and home hardware stores, agricultural stores, and online to ensure you get the best deal.

Water Footprint

Remember, that if your concern is not just for UK water supplies but also for drought affected regions worldwide, most of the UK's "water footprint" is not what we see being used in the home.

It comes from water used to grow and produce the products we import to the UK: mainly our food, but also textiles and other processed goods - it takes a lot of water to grow grain, some of which we import from the most water-scarce countries in the world. Most grain produced (e.g. 97% of world soya crop) is then fed to animals, so meat has a particularly high water footprint, as does cotton - a very thirsty crop.

Find out more about your Water Footprint and learn how to reduce it (or at least direct your impact away from the most water sensitive areas of the world) by carefully choosing what you buy.