Water saving

forestfruits

Anybody got any ideas how to conserve water? Im looking to reduce water usage in my home - easily if possible- as it has been raining fairly contantly for the past month at least how can I reuse rainwater?

Thrill

We had the device in the link below fitted to the toilets at work recently. It took only a couple of minutes to install each one. The idea is that when you flush and you see that everything has been washed away, you press the button and it stops the flushing action immediately, saving water.

http://www.meconwml.com/info.html

Some tips here....

http://www.videojug.com/film/how-to-conserve-water

I've always used step 3 in the clip, the teeth washing one, which saves a lot of water.

Step 6 in the clip, about collecting rainwater is another really good one if you do a lot of gardening. You can also wash the dog with it if it's fresh (and you have a dog). you can then rinse it off using tap water.

Step 7 in the clip. Like step 3, you can do this straight away to start saving water immediately. You can do this instead of using the device I mention at the top of the post.

July

Not sure about this if you're sharing a toilet but- "If it's yellow, let it mellow. If it's brown, flush it down". Think that comes from Oz.

JG1

I saw a showerhead in Cultivate in Dublin which reduces the amount of water used. From a crowd called Multishower - different showering experience but works well.

Oldtree

use a water hippo in the toilet cistern

The simplest one is to use a plastic bottle, cut the top off, put in a few stones to weigh down and fill with water. This will save about a litre every flush. if you have more than one toilet, then use one for the yellow and allow for a larger water displacement, maby up to 2 litres!

easy to do, reuses plastic bottle, no costs involved, and saves money if you are metered

Greenman

Its great to see you all thinking about saving water, but why would the vast majority bother when you don't directly pay for your drinking water.

Where I live we pay for what we use and the same again for the water that flows out our drains. If this was done in Ireland I think people would be greatly motivated to save water.

JD,Belgium.

Musha

Rain water harvesting is the only way to go, using filters to make it suitable for washing and domestic use.

Then RO system to refine it more for drinking, cooking etc

I just got a water bill for six months for €532 and that was for domestic use only on a 4 person house.
Will be installing a rainwater harvesting equipment this winter

Greenman

Musha wrote: »

I just got a water bill for six months for €532 and that was for domestic use only on a 4 person house.

Where do you live?

Musha

Greenman wrote: »

Where do you live?

Limerick, It came through because a council employee said that it was commerical because it is our Registered business address even though there are no commerical water application run from the house. Fighting with the council to get it wiped. as we have a retail showroom as well and will end up paying twice.

Hence the rainwater harvester, currently planing the install because it is another €1000 a year I don't want to have to pay when the water charges come in.

mumhaabu

Musha wrote: »

Rain water harvesting is the only way to go, using filters to make it suitable for washing and domestic use.

Then RO system to refine it more for drinking, cooking etc

I just got a water bill for six months for €532 and that was for domestic use only on a 4 person house.
Will be installing a rainwater harvesting equipment this winter

Simply cut the pipe and tap in outside the meter it is actually quie simple to do. Also don't pay that bill BTW! put Return to sender on it "as owner no longer at this address" and it will confuse the morons in the Council long enough for you to get out of it.

Water is a simple human right and it is not a commodity or a utility that can be bought or sold incase anybody hasn't noticed it rains outside every single day there is no shortage of the stuff or there wont be for a long long long time to come.

Greenman wrote:

If this was done in Ireland I think people would be greatly motivated to save water.

JD,Belgium.

I also suggest we charge the arabs for their sand, this is Ireland is never stops raining we do not need to conserve water I personally use over half a million litres a year on different things. Water rates in all forms are unacceptable and they must be lifted on business also and it is yet another form of stealth taxation. I would have all tose conserve water ads scrapped and instead conserve money by sacking the idiots responsible.

BendiBus

Water is a simple human right and it is not a commodity or a utility that can be bought or sold

That's fine for water you collect yourself, but if you want it cleaned, treated, stored and piped to your house then you should pay for that service.

more tea vicar

If you are a 25 stone fatty and are scoffing through piles of cakes and have no idea of your weight or how many cakes you have scoffed, then you need to invest in some weighing scales.

Like water, if you are snorting through hundreds of cubic metres of the stuff, leaking it away willy nilly, like some dehydrated hog monster, then you need a water meter.

Buy a meter to just pipe on your incoming house feed, usually the black hydrodare pipe - 1/2" bore - 3/4" nominal diameter (just under 22mm), won't cost a hill of beans, and away you go.

If you are a frugal household think about 100 litres or less a day as being very good, and if ye are a bloated aul sponger, then over 300 litres a day may sound normal to some but is getting on the high side of what is actual average domestic use.

If your house is using less than 40 cubic metres a year you are kickin ass, if you are using way over 100 cubic metres, then expect to get penalties in the future when water metering and conservation becomes tougher, so just get with the programme now and get used to it.

Forget EPA stats about water distribution figures on public and group water supplies versus households for an answer.

About half of the water is lost before it gets to houses in the pipe distributon system because of leaky old road mains feeds and unmetered farmers scoff up a right load too.

A single domestic house, with a single small overflow dribble from the cistern to inside the pan, can without knowing it for a few years, easily be losing an extra 1,000 litres of water per day, and if dribbles are found on two toilets or more, just keep multiplying this.

Underground leaks are harder to spot, but just as easy to meter.

There is no excuse in being a water hog, and when it comes to it in the future you will get yer asses slapped, just get yer act sorted now and you may get away with just 100 euros or less per year for all yer water needs.

Oh, and rainwater harvesting ideas? Just think about it, 5,000 euros + for an excavated concrete 10k gallon tank, a few thousand more for treatment, pumps etc.

If you pay up to 10k euros, that is one hundred years to re-coup your costs if it was just 100 euros a year for a mains supply.

I do not think water rates are unacceptable, or are there are idiots behind the supply and infrastructure costs.

The idiots are the water losers throwing the stuff away and thinking it cost now't.

more tea vicar

Oh yeah, if ye have already dug yer rainwater tank, and have the nice treatment system set up ready in yer shed, to save all that money, were you forgetting about annual maintenance?

Treatment systems on rainwater tanks can vary from one hundred to three hundred euros a year to maintain.

What does that cost in the next hundred years?

jcgowran

Rainwater harvesting is an expensive option with a long pay back if you go for a large system. A barrel under the chute whill fill quickly in wet weather when you don't neeed rainwater for the garden anyway and will not fill at all in dry weather. You need to save water on toilet flushing where 33% of water coming into your house is used.

ZYX

more tea vicar wrote: »

If you are a 25 stone fatty and are scoffing through piles of cakes and have no idea of your weight or how many cakes you have scoffed, then you need to invest in some weighing scales.

Like water, if you are snorting through hundreds of cubic metres of the stuff, leaking it away willy nilly, like some dehydrated hog monster, then you need a water meter.

Buy a meter to just pipe on your incoming house feed, usually the black hydrodare pipe - 1/2" bore - 3/4" nominal diameter (just under 22mm), won't cost a hill of beans, and away you go.

If you are a frugal household think about 100 litres or less a day as being very good, and if ye are a bloated aul sponger, then over 300 litres a day may sound normal to some but is getting on the high side of what is actual average domestic use.

If your house is using less than 40 cubic metres a year you are kickin ass, if you are using way over 100 cubic metres, then expect to get penalties in the future when water metering and conservation becomes tougher, so just get with the programme now and get used to it.

Forget EPA stats about water distribution figures on public and group water supplies versus households for an answer.

About half of the water is lost before it gets to houses in the pipe distributon system because of leaky old road mains feeds and unmetered farmers scoff up a right load too.

A single domestic house, with a single small overflow dribble from the cistern to inside the pan, can without knowing it for a few years, easily be losing an extra 1,000 litres of water per day, and if dribbles are found on two toilets or more, just keep multiplying this.

Underground leaks are harder to spot, but just as easy to meter.

There is no excuse in being a water hog, and when it comes to it in the future you will get yer asses slapped, just get yer act sorted now and you may get away with just 100 euros or less per year for all yer water needs.

Oh, and rainwater harvesting ideas? Just think about it, 5,000 euros + for an excavated concrete 10k gallon tank, a few thousand more for treatment, pumps etc.

If you pay up to 10k euros, that is one hundred years to re-coup your costs if it was just 100 euros a year for a mains supply.

I do not think water rates are unacceptable, or are there are idiots behind the supply and infrastructure costs.

The idiots are the water losers throwing the stuff away and thinking it cost now't.

But why is saving water a Green Issue. This is a genuine question. I try to save electricity and gas. I drive as little as possible (walk nearly everywhere) but when it comes to water to be honest I don't try at all. Why should I? From a green point of view i mean.

conZ

Musha wrote: »

Limerick, It came through because a council employee said that it was commerical because it is our Registered business address even though there are no commerical water application run from the house. Fighting with the council to get it wiped. as we have a retail showroom as well and will end up paying twice.

Hence the rainwater harvester, currently planing the install because it is another €1000 a year I don't want to have to pay when the water charges come in.

Limerick CC has, for the last few years, been undergoing a Non-Domestic Water Metering Project, which you probably already know about.

A few different companies have the contract, so it would be best to ring the Council, ask for the information of the company involved with the Pre Installation and Database compiling (possibly Coffeys - but not too sure - they have an office for the project in Limerick anyway).

Tell them there's been a problem with your property and the information from the property has been compiled incorrectly. Ask them to send out a Surveyor to carry out another pre-installation survey on both properties and meters to double check both properties to make sure one is a Domestic, and the other Commercial.

That excuse out of the CC Engineer is bull, think about how many other business' in the city have different Registered address' to the Commercial unit and they're surely not getting 2nd bills. Also, seeing that you're getting 2 bills, you would have 2 non-domestic accounts/connections on the database, and you clearly don't have 2 ND connections.

It may take a while for them to send out someone, as the project should be nearing an end, but i'd imagine they'd be out to you within a week (ring twice or more to make sure anyway). (I would nearly say nothing about the bill dispute with Limerick CC at this stage.) He'll come out and test the connection/supply to the house, and scope out the property to make sure there are no non-domestic elements to the house, so show him about if he wants, be forthcoming. They're only the Contractor after all, they're working against the Council too, so you can tell him what you want really, he won't be working against you. Also give him a couple of contact numbers just so the CC have no excuses.

Once the survey has been completed, he'll send the survey in as a Domestic to the CC and it'll be put up on the CC database as a Domestic (the contractors are also compiling the new, updated, super databases for the billing/information/meter details and reads for the Councils as they're generally Design Build and Operate contracts for over 10 years...).

Ask the Contractor (or it's rep - the Surveyor) to send in a query to the Limerick CC Resident Engineer with the project, stating that your property has been resurveyed by the Contractors Surveyor, which concluded that you've only one Non-Domestic property. State that you've recieved a bill from the council for a Domestic Property. The RE will probably come out to each property to survey them himself, and make sure that the info the contractor has supplied is correct. Show him around, don't give away too much information, but just state your case and show him that there are no Non-Dom elements at your home.

Then go back to the person you've been dealing with regarding your €500 Domestic bill, and state that the Contractor from the Non Domestic Water Metering Project has been out to both properties and had them resurveyed, and it turns out one is domestic, the other non-domestic. State that the new surveys have been sent into the RE for the project, and (if he has) that the RE (John Smith or whatever) has been out to your properties and clarified the Contractors survey.

Then get him to check with the RE regarding the resurveyed property and tell him that as this property is and has been non domestic, you won't be paying a bill, as - "Water charges
Domestic water charges were abolished in 1997..." - http://www.citizensinformation.ie/categories/environment/water-services/water_supply

Councils are bastards really, departments never work too well with each other, nor communicate, and as this project is still in process they'eer being quite lazy regarding the billing system, and possibly your complaint - they're just waiting for Coffeys to finish it and they'll be looking after it for the next 10 years. Therefore, you should go to the Contractor, get them to sort it (as it's up to them) then get on to the Council, and tell them what the contractor has concluded.