5 Easy Ways to Save Money On Your Water Bill

Everyone would like to save a little green, am I right?! And being eco-friendly doesn’t hurt either! I try to be environmentally conscious whenever I can. The benefits of this can stretch all the way to your wallet, and with these 5 easy steps to reducing your water usage, you will be surprised at what a little change can do for your bank account!

5 easy ways to save money on water

1. Change Your Shower Head – This is the biggie in my opinion. If you change your shower head to a low flow shower head the amount of water you use will cut down drastically. Some service providers will actually send you one for FREE! That’s how we got ours, and it works great! Ours has a bunch of settings all the way from a full spray to a hard, more direct spray. After using it for a shower or two you will soon forget the difference, and the savings are measurable! According to neo.ne.gov...If the average person spends approximately 10 minutes in the shower each day, the difference in water use becomes obvious:365 days per year x 10 minutes per day x 3.5 gpm (conventional shower head) = 12,775 gallons per year
   365 days per year x 10 minutes per day x 2 gpm (low-flow shower head) = 7,300 gallons per year
   The low-flow shower head will save approximately 43 percent of the hot water bill attributed to shower use.
2. Get New Faucet Aerators – When looking on the side of your aerator (the metal ring where the water comes out) if it reads more than 1.5 gallons per minute, you should replace it. You can check your kitchen, bathroom and any other room such as a laundry room where you might have a faucet to see if it needs to be replaced.
3. Turn Your Water Heater Down – Most households require a water heater to only be set at 120 degrees. However, if you have a dishwasher without a booster heater you may need to set your heater at 130-140 degrees to get a good cleaning. According to energy.gov if your water heater is set too high, or at 140ºF, your water heater can waste anywhere from $36 to $61 annually in standby heat losses and more than $400 in demand losses.
4. Sprinkler – During the Spring and Summer months in particular when we like to have nice, healthy looking yards and flowers we tend to use a sprinkler. All too often I see people placing their sprinklers too close to the road and they are watering some of their lawn, but mostly the road. Uh oh! Be sure to change the setting or place your sprinkler so that you are watering only want you want. Once it’s in place, a good tip would be to set a timer so that you know exactly how long you want it to run and that way you won’t forget about it too. Lastly, check the weather. If rain is in the forecast see if you can forgo using a sprinkler altogether!
5. Adjust Your Laundry Loads and Settings – Most washing machines have a number of settings that can be tailored to the type of load you are going to be washing. Take advantage of these settings. For instance, my washer will wash for a longer period of time and fill up with more water if I place a larger load in the machine. If you have a small load, make sure to readjust your settings. But if you can, wait till you have larger loads or if you can combine loads. That way you aren’t running your washer as much and that also saves you time!

Those 5 simple steps will help to save you money and time! According to cleanenergyresourceteams.org homeowners pay for water three times—once to buy it from a utility, once to heat it using natural gas or electricity, and once to dispose of it as waste water. So why not do all that you can to lower your expenses and the toll it takes on our beautiful Earth.