The water is wide, I cannot swim oooooooover

[ailbhe]

We are not in the affected area but Thames Water do supply our water and it does seem to be in short supply right now.

Water-saving measures we have recently undertaken:

• Using a dishwasher instead of washing dishes by hand (saving about 20 litres a day, which is embarrassing)


• Rob and Linnea bath together


• Rainwater from the paddling pool was used to water the garden when it was too icky to paddle in any more


• R+L had a soapless bath and the water was used for the paddling pool, with lots of salt in so that it will take longer to go icky


• More leftover bathwater was used for watering the garden


• I left the plug in when I had a shower to we can use the revolting soapy water for something like loo-flushing if we find another bucket

I really am annoyed that we don't have lots of information from Thames Water about greywater flushing and how to set it up - it can't be that complicated. We've ordered a waterbutt with the bits and pieces for fitting it but the waiting list is long.

The big problems, as far as I can tell, here where we are, are landfill waste and water usage. I wish the people who manage these things - the people I pay are the council and Thames Water - would tell me what I can do to stop making it any worse than I have to.

Comments

[ailbhe]

To wash and rinse a meal's worth of dishes takes me about 15 litres of water. More if I'm careless. The dishwasher does two meals' worth in 9 litres. And in 30 minutes. I don't know how the power thing works out, but short-term and locally, water is the scarce resource. I'll investigate the power issue later in the year :)

[oldbloke.livejournal.com]

In other news, car aircon reduces mpg less than having the windows open!

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

ah, you have numbers! you rule. i am now driven to experiment. :)

one reason why i think dishwashers feel wasteful to me is that i watch so many people with dishwashers pre-rinse their dishes under running water -- that, of course, doesn't save any water, but it's also not to blame entirely on the dishwasher. though the reason they say they rinse them is that apparently the washer isn't powerful enough to get things really clean otherwise. me, i just scrape the bits off while they're still wet, and it all goes into the compost (animal fats too; small amounts really make no difference). those people don't generally have a kitchen scraps container either, and stuff will of course crust on nicely if it sits for a while.

i wash dishes by hand, and i do more than one meal in one wash (because i am a lazy bum), but i use two sinks; one for soaking and cleaning, one for rinsing. and in between, i blithely wash the occasional favourite container or pot all by its lonesome, though i don't run a whole sink full of water for that. i would still do that if i had a dishwasher though.

off to measure how much water goes into one of my sinks. i am really curious now how much water we waste. because once we're living on the boat, that'll become an issue; we might as well start practicing now.

[oldbloke.livejournal.com]

I find we only have trouble with stuff you can expect to be trouble when you look at it, so that tends to get dumped in the bowl in the sink which always has some water in it from washing veg or something. That softens everything up nicely. And maybe occasionally with a very full load, the jets can't reach some bits. So anything that doesn't come out clean just goes back in again.

My ex-in-laws used to wash up about 6 times a day (breakfast, morning snack, lunch, afternoon snack, dinner, evening snack). Incredibly wasteful of both resources and their own time, especially as all those snacks were, like, a plate each for one biscuit or slice of cake and a cup, and could easily have waited. Of course they had an awful lot of time with nothing much to fill it... And I did sometimes think she'd rather be in the kitchen washing up than with him...

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

well, some people are neat freaks too, or less pejoratively put, they don't like having dirty dishes sitting around attracting whatever they think those attract, evil germs, or disdainful looks from surprise visitors, or their own guilt at being less than perfect housekeepers. who knows what psychosocial factors play into this -- i know my parents would have never gotten a dishwasher even after they could afford it; it was marked as a wasteful show-off luxury item; real women did their dishes by hand, as god intended.

i didn't inherit the stuff god intended, but apparently i still think of dishwashers as wasteful luxury items. *gets out the psychological adjustment wrench*.

[ailbhe]

I was convinced, right up until I actually checked the numbers for my personal dishwashing water usage that dishwasher were for lazy wasteful eco-thugs. Well, more or less.

It has been very liberating, using the wrench.

[artela.livejournal.com]

You can get power economy rating A dishwashers - our new one is rating A.

This page is very useful:
http://www.cus.net/electricity/subcats/elecappliances.html

[ailbhe]

Obviously we got an A dishwasher - we always get A appliances or not at all - but I don't know how that compares to heating the water to wash by hand, since we use gas for that. I suspect that as we're heating more water to wash by hand it's energy-cheaper to use the dishwasher, too, but not certain.