Go Green with Environmentally-Friendly Plumbing Practices
October 9, 2008
American homes consume about 100 gallons of water a day -that’s almost 70% more than homes of other industrialized countries. Residential water use makes up 47 percent of the water supplied by U.S. water utilities. We can each become more environmentally friendly, and our plumbing systems are a good place to start. There are lots of ways you can save money and the environment if you just take the time, including some well-known and not-so-well-known ways.
You can use a water filtering system in your home to purify enough water to fill more than three-thousand disposable plastic water bottles every year. You would save money by not paying the store mark up on bottled water (and you would know for sure where the water was coming from). A by-product of crude oil is used to produce disposable water bottles, every year more than sixteen million barrels of oil are used in the creation of all of the bottles used in the U.S. By reducing the number of bottles we throw away, we reduce our dependence on crude oil.
Graywater/greywater systems are a safe and easy way to collect and filter the water used by faucets, dishwashers, and washing machines, and then reuse it for non-drinking water purposes. One example would be using this recycled water to water your plants. Graywater systems also keep your soil well irrigated by diverting water to it instead of your local sewage system.
The cheapest, easiest, and most effective modifications to your plumbing system are low-flow additions such as shower heads, toilets, and faucet aerators. These can reduce your home water consumption by up to fifty-percent. Not only that, but what you may not realize is that by reducing your water consumption, you automatically reduce the amount of water that you heat -cutting the energy your hot water heater uses by up to fifty-percent.
Leaky faucets: The steady drip of a leaky tap isn’t just annoying, it can really add up. Fixing your leaky faucets is a way to keep water and money from slipping down the drain. The average American household consumes about 90 gallons of water a day. About 12.6 gallons of that is due to faucet, toilet, and pipe leaks. Stopping this ongoing loss is as easy as calling your plumber to fix that chronic leak that you’ve been putting off. A dripping faucet can waste up to 74 gallons a day, a leaking toilet up to 200 gallons a day. Repair a leaky toilet and you can save 73,000 gallons a year.
An alternative to wasting pipes and drywall is epoxy pipe lining — CuraFlo’s epoxy pipe lining system is an environmentally friendly alternative to repipe. It takes less time than pipe replacement and generally costs less. Pipes are cleaned out and epoxy lined through connections to your existing plumbing fixtures and valves, nearly or completely eliminating the need to cut open walls. And best of all, epoxy lining your pipes can prevent erosion and corrosion damage to your pipes that led to the need for repair or replacement in the first place.
But by far, the least-expensive, quickest, and best overall changes you can make to your plumbing system are adding low-flow shower heads, toilets, and faucet aerators. It’s possible for these to reduce your home water use by up to fifty-percent. Additionally, by reducing your water usage, you’re reducing the amount of water that you heat -cutting the energy use of your hot water heater by up to half.
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