American homes consume about 100 gallons of water a day -that’s almost 70% more than homes of other industrialized countries. Residential water use makes up 47 percent of the water supplied by U.S. water utilities. We can each become more environmentally friendly, and our plumbing systems are a good place to start. There are lots of ways you can save money and the environment if you just take the time, including some well-known and not-so-well-known ways.
A leaking faucet isn’t just annoying, it also costs you money. Fixing it keeps your money from going down the drain. Roughly twelve and a half gallons of a household’s water use is attributed to faucet, toilet, and pipe leaks. A dripping faucet can waste up to seventy-four gallons a day, a leaking toilet up to two-hundred gallons a day. A quick repair by you or your plumber now, will save you money in the long run.
Graywater/greywater systems are a safe and easy way to collect and filter the water used by faucets, dishwashers, and washing machines, and then reuse it for non-drinking water purposes. One example would be using this recycled water to water your plants. Graywater systems also keep your soil well irrigated by diverting water to it instead of your local sewage system.
The cheapest, easiest, and most effective modifications to your plumbing system are low-flow additions such as shower heads, toilets, and faucet aerators. These can reduce your home water consumption by up to fifty-percent. Not only that, but what you may not realize is that by reducing your water consumption, you automatically reduce the amount of water that you heat -cutting the energy your hot water heater uses by up to fifty-percent.
A home water filtering system can purify enough water to fill more than three-thousand of the plastic water bottles thrown away every year, you can save a lot of money by not paying the mark-up on store bought water. By reducing the use of these disposable bottles, we also reduce our dependency on crude oil, whose by-product is used to create plastic water bottles. Every year, about seventeen million barrels of oil are used to supply Americans with all the plastic water bottles they use.
When leaky pipes can’t be repaired because of too many pinhole leaks or another systemic problem, what can you do? Traditionally the solution has been to replace your plumbing system -to repipe, but that means cutting walls open and tearing out pipes. So not only are you throwing away the old pipes and the drywall that had to be removed to get at them, but then you need to replace them with new pipes and drywall. Manufacturing these new materials has an environmental impact.
An alternative to wasting pipes and drywall is epoxy pipe lining — CuraFlo’s epoxy pipe lining system is an environmentally friendly alternative to repipe. It takes less time than pipe replacement and generally costs less. Pipes are cleaned out and epoxy lined through connections to your existing plumbing fixtures and valves, nearly or completely eliminating the need to cut open walls. And best of all, epoxy lining your pipes can prevent erosion and corrosion damage to your pipes that led to the need for repair or replacement in the first place.
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