3 Ways To Save On Water Around The House

Living a more frugal lifestyle has lots of advantages. You get to flex your creative muscles and figure out new ways to do things that don’t cost an arm and a leg. You also get to bank extra cash while reducing your living expenses, which makes your eventual retirement a whole lot more doable. When your life isn’t that expensive in the first place, you won’t need to save as much to cover yourself for life after work and you’ll have freed up more cash to pay off your debts or dump into your IRA.

But not all of the benefits of frugality are selfish ones.

Environmentalism may be totally trendy — in a way that frugality probably never will be — but doing the right thing by the planet is also generally good for your wallet, too. And that makes perfect sense: A big way to save money is to use less of your expensive resources, and conserving fuel and water also happen to be good for the environment.

After all, that old “reduce, reuse, recycle” mantra could just as easily have been coined by a tightwad as a treehugger.

Don’t Let Your Money Go Down the Drain

Unless you already get all of your water directly from the sky via a complex system of rain barrels and homemade carbon filters — in which case, can I have your autograph? — you’re paying for the privilege of fresh drinking water every day. Whether you write a check to your city service department or pay for your water in your rent, water’s not free. And as recently drought-stricken Californians know, it’s also not an unlimited resource.

To save money and beef up your environmental bona fides, here’s how to use less water around the house. We’ll start with the easiest possible hacks and level up from there. Complete all three, and you’re an aqua-master of the highest degree.

Let’s do this.

Level One: Drink Tap Water

If you’re buying bottled water, stop immediately.

Full stop.

Seriously, if you think buying water is somehow better for your health than drinking the stuff that comes out of the faucet of any U.S. city, you’ve been had.

Thanks to decades of slick marketing, some people are spending up to 300 times the amount their tap water costs for the privilege of filling landfills with plastic bottles. Bottled water isn’t even as tightly regulated as tap, so the safety issue is a bogus a selling point, unless you have arsenic in your private well or something.

And if you really just can’t stand the taste? Get a Brita filter — you’ll still save about $100 a year per person in your family.

Level Two: Aerate Your Faucets

Ready to let your inner plumber out? You don’t even need a monkey wrench for this project, but you can slash your water usage in half with the flick of the wrist and a $5 investment at the hardware store.

Faucet aerators are basically little screens that block the flow of your tap. They let you feel like the water pressure is still high by adding air to the flow, but less water is actually coming out. I swapped my old 2.2 gpm (that’s gallon per minute) bathroom faucet aerators out for .5 gpm ones, and it saved me about $130 per year on my water bills. I attribute/blame this on my wasteful children, so your mileage may vary.

Here’s your step-by-step instructions:

1. Unscrew the old aerator from your faucet with your bare hands (it helps if it’s dry). This is the round silver “cap” at the very end of the spigot that water shoots out of.
2. Take the old aerator along on a Home Depot run so you know what size to get for the new one. Slap down $5 for the lowest flow one you can find.
3. Open the package and screw the new aerator in place. Enjoy your savings immediately.
4. Once the water has drained from the tank, put your jug in the tank, making sure that it’s not blocking any of the moving parts.
5. Your tank will slowly fill back up, but with about a half-gallon less water each time. This won’t affect your toilet’s functioning at all, but it will save you water every time someone uses the toilet.
6. Replace the tank lid and revel in your accomplishment for the rest of the day.

For a family of four in which everyone hits the john four times per day, you’ll save eight gallons of water every day — all without any change in habits.

Saving Without the Sacrifice

If you’re worried that frugality will somehow cramp your style or force you to constantly think about money, these water hacks are a great place to start your journey. Once you spend about 10 minutes setting each one up (whether it’s a mini-plumbing job or getting a Brita filter pitcher for the fridge), you’ll never notice that you’re saving water — until you open your utility bill.

Then comes the fun part: deciding what you’ll you do with your savings!