It’s no secret that the planet’s population has exploded, while the amount of freshwater has remained essentially the same over time. What’s more, water is life— and only 1 percent of the planet’s freshwater is easily accessible. The remaining freshwater supply is increasingly being polluted by environmental disasters. More and more extreme weather events are causing greater exposure of our water supply to biological contamination and water-borne diseases. Many of the synthetic chemicals that are used in our everyday products are accumulating in our bodies and in our water supply. And our water treatment and distribution systems in our most heavily populated areas are aging and deteriorating faster that we can repair and upgrade them.

Lack of access to clean drinking water supplies has been at crisis levels for a long time in some regions of the world, and the crisis is spreading. To deny that we are not all connected by this shared reliance on planetary fresh water supplies is to deny the fundamental science of the water cycle.

Wars are already being fought in some places in the world over access to water for drinking, bathing, cooking, cleaning, industrial uses, manufacturing of goods, food production, and the list goes on.

There are many great resources online and offline with information, statistics, tips, guidance, resources and tools for all of us to get educated on the nature and seriousness of the global water crisis. It’s imperative that we take educated individual and collective action towards water efficient living for the good of all.

And make no mistake—this isn’t about future generations. This mother of all crises threatens our survival within our own lifetimes. Water is life— make an effort and get started NOW. Failure is NOt an option.

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Fifteen years ago we were all turning off the faucet while we brushed our teeth and cutting those plastic six pack things up with scissors so that they wouldn’t strangle ducks. These days it’s all about electric cars and windmills and reducing our carbon footprint. In other words, the sermon has changed when it comes to conservation, but the fact is that people never did change that much. So we should still be just as interested in how to save water as we are about carbon credits. Every society changes over time, but perhaps when it comes to saving water we should take a look back – way back.

Just 150 years ago everyone was a water conservationist. No really, no one wasted a drop. Not because they were afraid their grandkids wouldn’t have enough, but for a far more pragmatic reason. If you had to carry every drop of water you used in a bucket from as far as a mile away – you would conserve it too. Gravity fed plumbing is what has led to the monumental waste of water. Call it a crime of convenience. The water runs out, and you don’t even think about it. If you had to carry it one 20 pound bucket a time a thousand steps each way instead of just flipping a little metal handle; well, you would be a lot more careful with it too.

The real shame is that most of the water you use isn’t really all that dirty when you’re done with it. As a matter of fact, the stuff that comes out of your sink and tub makes the greatest stuff ever to put on your plants and lawn. The proper term for this type of water is gray water. It’s a little cloudy from soap suds and maybe some foodstuffs or dirt from your feet and hands, but other than those minor things it’s fine. You wouldn’t want to make lemonade out of it, but it would be great on the rhododendrons. About the only thing in your home that really needs to be seriously treated is what’s coming from your toilet, and that’s completely understandable. Although, not too many decades ago everyone was perfectly ok with the outhouse – but that’s another soap box for another day.

Want to rid yourself of plumbing problems once and for all? Want the greenest yard in town without installing a super wasteful automatic sprinkler system? See if it is within your city ordinances to run your gray water out onto your lawn. we once had a minor leak in the water coming from our kitchen out to the main sewer pipe. It went right under the garden. You should have seen the plants simply explode. There were basil bushes six feet tall and the tomatoes? Our mouths still water to this day in a sort of pavlovian way to the thought of those bright red bulging tomatoes.

So, if you’re really serious about looking for tips on how to save water, the best place to start is the two areas where the most water is wasted; watering the lawn and gray water waste from the house. Hey, if you can kill two birds with one stone, that’s saving a lot of water without ever changing a thing about your lifestyle.

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Water saving shower heads are the easiest way to begin conserving water. There’s really not that much to it. You just remove the old shower head and screw the new one on; really, anyone can do it. But it’s also something you probably don’t think about too often. So whether you just got the water saving bug, or it’s slipped your mind up until now, it’s high time you took that little bit of action and replaced the shower heads around your house.

And what does it take in order to qualify as a water saving shower head? That’s easy too. Anything that flows less than 2.75 gallons per minute is said to be a low flow shower head. But most models come in under 2.5 gallons per minute all the way down to 1.3 gallons per minute. And the math isn’t all that hard. A 1.3 gpm water saving shower head will use almost half as much water as a 2.5 gpm shower head, and will save three time as much water as a 3.6 gpm shower head.

The other nice thing is that you’ll hardly be able to tell the difference in the shower. You’ll also use a whole lot less hot water in the process. Less hot water means a lower electricity bill as well. So not only will you be saving water, you’ll be saving money as well. And you might not want to stop at just water saving shower heads, you can also get water saving aerators for the faucets in your house while you’re at it. Flow rates for water saving aerators range from .5 gpm up to 1.5.

And all those little changes add up to using a lot less water over the course of a year. It’s really quite amazing just how much water we let rush down the drain that’s not ever put to good use. You won’t single-handedly save the planet by installing water saving shower heads in your home, but you’ll be doing your part to cut back on the load we all place on our water supply and aging distribution infrastructure. A lot of people using half as much water means a lot less water wasted, and more water, and showers, in the future.

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It wasn’t all that long ago that people were carrying their water in buckets. And that’s the case in many places in the world to this day. I guarantee you that if you had to slog along hefting a bucket ten or fifteen times to take a bath you wouldn’t just dump it out without a thought, but you would probably take a lot fewer baths. I’m all for a nice smelling society, but the instant availability of water at your fingertips makes it begin to feel like there is a completely unlimited supply of the stuff, but that’s just not the case is it? So it’s time you looked into a few simple water saving devices that will give you the ability to really cut down on your consumption without having to go without the bath.

You probably know (at least you should), all about water saving shower heads and faucet aerators. As a matter of fact, you may already be using them without knowing it. Almost everything made in the last ten years has been the low flow variety when it comes to shower heads and faucet aerators; so if you’ve replaced on of those in the last decade you are probably already saving water without even knowing it. But it wouldn’t hurt to check. Water saving devices such as low flow shower heads and sink aerators are a great place to start, but they aren’t the whole story.

A couple of other things you would probably never really think about when it comes to water saving devices are toilet tank displacement devices and shower heads with shut off valves. It’s one thing for a shower head to be low flow when it comes to how many gallons per minute it puts out, but you can really magnify the savings if you will shut off the water completely when you are soaping up. You don’t really need a special shower head with a shut off valve to do that, of course, but the do make it easy.

And then there’s the toilet thing. No one wants to return to the outhouse days of digging big holes in the yard and having to walk across the snow covered yard at 3 am to take a leak. But toilets are water flushing little monsters. There are inexpensive kits you can buy that really cut down on the amount of water per flush toilets use that can help you tame them a bit.

Combining all of these water saving devices in your home will cut down on the amount of water you use by more than half and will do so without you ever even noticing a difference. You don’t have to go back to the days of the outhouse and carrying water around in buckets to really save a lot of water. You can keep the convenience of modern life and still be a lot more responsible about your water usage at the same time. It’s not just smart to save money, you’ll also be doing your part to conserve the only environment we have.

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If you’re like me, there’s nothing quite so soothing and lovely as a long hot shower. And not at the hotel. Really, I don’t think there is such a thing as a great shower at a hotel. You never quite get the temperature right and – but that’s not really my point. I was a little too young for the water saving craze before all this global warming carbon footprint stuff came along, so it didn’t quite stick like it should. Low flow shower heads just aren’t on the radar at age 18. But as I got older I suppose the conservative part of me finally grew up enough to tell the more wasteful bits of me to shove off. And so now I’m stuck with loving a good, long, hot, soak and feeling terribly guilty about it at the same time.

Enter the low flow shower head. I fought them for a while, but at this point it’s just about all you can buy, so there became a time that I was just stuck with them. And you know what? They’re really not that much different after all. It’s not like the old Niagara Falls version of a shower that I had grown accustomed to, but that is the point now isn’t it? We just can’t go around washing hundreds of gallons of clean water down the drain.

And you don’t want to stop at just the shower head either. There are low flow faucets for both bathrooms and kitchens. Anywhere a stream of water comes out of a pipe you need to seriously consider going from full blast to something quite a bit less. Yeah, it’s going to take you about ten seconds longer to rinse out that huge pot that you cooked gumbo in, but you’ll also shave a few gallons of water a day (or more depending on how long you tend to let water just run away down the drain). And don’t worry about those nice hot showers, I thought I would but I switched to the low flow shower head anyway.

And bought a hot tub instead. And now the low flow shower heads are completely entrenched in my life, and I feel a lot better for it. There are simply hundreds of varieties available, and you’re sure to be able to find one that fits your decor and budget, as well as personal showering tastes. Take it from me, a low flow shower head can really make a lot of difference in how much water you use, and you’ll hardly ever notice a difference in the shower you take.

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In the midst of the conservation frenzy over carbon and all the global warming flap something that was a hot topic less than a decade ago is beginning to be a bit overlooked. Water saving used to be a big deal, now everyone is worrying more about energy consumption. And that’s a shame really. Depending on who you are listening to we’re still in far greater peril of having water shortages than we are a huge temperature rise, yet we’ve lost the focus on saving water.

The truth is that no matter what your viewpoint is about anthropomorphic global warming, water is the most precious resource we have. It’s also one of the easiest things for people to haphazardly waste as though there was a never-ending supply of it. But there just isn’t. As populations explode the need for water saving measures grows.

And you’ve probably heard some of the easy tips for conserving water. Turn off the water while washing your hair or hands – there’s no need for water to be running while you’re doing something else. Replace old faucets and shower heads with newer, more water efficient models. Don’t water your lawn as though having the greenest grass in the city is the most important thing in the world. Those are the easy water saving measures that we used to be peppered with all the time, but if you dig a little deeper you can find other ways of saving water that take almost no effort at all and will hardly inconvenience you in any way.

One of the biggest culprits is that garbage disposal. Besides the fact that plumbers love them because they clog pipes and break down (leading to a nice fat repair bill for them) they are also water hogs. You have to let the water run to wash down all that goop that a disposal churns out – water that is completely wasted. It’s not even washing dishes at the time. Best practice? Get rid of the thing and just throw the scraps in the trash or your compost pile. It’s really not that much harder and will save you plumbing issues, electricity and lots of water over the years.

Another hidden water guzzler is your dishwasher and washing machine. Some models go through four or five fill cycles. Not that having clean clothes and dishes is a bad thing, and we’re certainly not going to tell you to chuck them outright. But you certainly want to make sure that you never run any automatic washer unless it is full to capacity. Two small loads of clothes still uses almost twice as much water as one big load. Besides, it will give you an excuse to procrastinate a bit while you let the dishes and laundry pile up.

Water saving measures don’t stop there, but you might not have thought about those electric convenience tools and how much water they simply drain away if not well supervised by a strict conservationist – someone, maybe, like you. You can cut down on your carbon footprint and be saving water at the same time by following these two water saving tips.

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