Top Tips on Saving Water


In our last blog article, we talked about how wasting water can harm the environment. Now we understand why saving water can help, how can we reduce our water usage?

Here’s 5 easy steps you can take:

1. Turn off the tap when you’re brushing your teeth, shaving or sluicing dishes.


One in three people leave the tap running between damping the toothbrush to spitting out the paste. Assuming these same people brush their teeth twice a day for the recommended two minutes, that’s 24 litres of water a day - or 110 bathtubs of water every year!

You can also save water by turning the tap off between washing a razor blade, or filling a small pool of hot water and repeatedly dipping it into that instead.

Likewise, when washing dishes by hand, many people (including ourselves), give the cleaned items a quick rinse before placing it on the drying rack. If the next item is, say, a saucepan with stubborn food which needs some serious elbow grease, then the tap will still be dumping out wasted water at the rate of 6 litres a minute.

Top tips on saving water blog - Water running from shower

2. Cut your shower time by a minute or two, or take a bath


If the amount of water a tap wastes surprised you, you’ll be even more concerned when you learn how much water a shower uses.

Typically, showers use between 5 and 10 gallons of water a minute. In general showers use less water than baths, but if you partially fill a bath, you can use less and make sure all of the water goes to actually cleaning you, instead of the time you spent getting the temperature just right, or thinking about the perfect comeback for the most recent argument you lost.

3. Reduce your shower’s water usage


If you love showers too much to part with them, or you simply don’t have a bath, you can reduce the amount of water a shower uses in two ways:

First, you could install a flow restrictor. These significantly reduce the flow of water and should cost no more than a tenner. They can even be installed without the help of a plumber.

Second, you could invest in a water-saving shower head. The good news is these can also cost less than £10 and are easy to fit. Not bad considering it can save the average person 9,000 litres of water per year.


4. Change the way you use your toilet


Ok - so on reflection that may have come across a bit odd! What we mean is, small changes can significantly reduce the amount of water your toilet uses (which, by the way, is up to 7 gallons of water per flush). Start by making sure you only use it as a toilet - not as a waste disposal unit for bits of tissue, cotton buds or makeup wipes you find scattered around (you shouldn’t be flushing these items anyway!).

You can also reduce the amount your toilet flushes by adding a brick to it, or a plastic bottle filled partway with small stones. This shouldn’t have a significant impact on the power or efficiency of the toilet and saves a significant amount of water.


5. Switch up your watering habits


Watering the garden uses up a massive amount of water. This is one of the reasons hosepipe bans are a first resort for reducing water usage.

But don’t worry, you can still keep your garden flourishing without costing the earth. Sensible ways to prevent water wastage are:

  • make sure your grass actually needs watering; if it springs back underfoot, it’s doing just fine!
  • water in the early morning or late evening, otherwise the sun will claim the majority of it through evaporation.
  • fill a watering can to manage the amount you are using.

It’s not as difficult as you might think!

During the current Covid-19 pandemic, which we are in the midst of at the time of writing, we have all had no choice but to adjust our habits - pretty much overnight! But, we did it.

Making small changes to your everyday habits doesn’t have to be difficult, and it is worth it as these changes can have a big impact.

Have you made any changes to your daily routine to help your family to save water? We’d love to hear from you!


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