Water butts and showers

I'm very excited :) I've ordered two water butts from Wilkinsons Online, complete with lid, tap and stand. A big one for the back of the house, a small one for the porch at the front - altogether the total is just over £50 including delivery. I've got to get them fitted yet, of course, but I'm very pleased at all that.

In the same order, I've also got a solar shower coming. I was having a long chat about experimenting with solar energy, basically because I'd wondered about how hot it gets upstairs in my house, and thinking I could just hang one of these camping showers in the window, then hey presto, a free shower :)

Well, when I was searching for water butts, I found one of the solar showers, also at Wilkinsons - their search engine isn't very good if it turns up "solar shower" when the search terms are "water butt", but I'll forgive them, because its coming along at the princely sum of £4.68 - even if it doesn't actually work here in the UK, I've had an interesting time talking about it with friends, and its a good experiment for the long term! Plus, when I live in Spain, in some future indeterminate time, it'll definitely come in handy by then :)

Energy Saving Trust website on water

Under the "At Home" section, Water is one of the seven main areas. The fun bit there is the energy calculator, which takes you through each room in your house, but it wildly overestimated my costs, and so probably my useage too - by a factor of over 100%

It said I should be paying £280 for 48,800 litres of water, and I actually pay £120, with £50 credit having built up on that basis. The savings suggested were watering my garden morning or evening, to avoid evaporation - I already do this; to save £10/4000 litres a year, to use a shower rather than a bath, to save £11/2,900 litres a year - a bath is a treat for me, not a regular thing, so I've discounted this suggestion; and to fit a trigger nozzle on the garden hosepipe instead of having a continuous flow. This would save £11/4,500 litres a year. And thats a really great suggestion, but out of place in this report, as I'd told it I didn't use a hosepipe!

So the calculator is quite fun, but not particularly intelligent.

There's a guide to how to instal a water butt - excellent! There's currently no videos on youtube about it that I can find, so this is helpful, even as simple photos.

There are water saving tips - basic, but there doesn't seem to be as many ways to save water as there to save fuel, for instance, so I'll take what I can get. Some day, I'll write up *all* the tips :)

Water efficient products - now, this is the real deal! Shower heads, appliances, insulation, toilets, taps, butts, hoses and labelling. Fantastic! This gives me a really great idea of where to start in my new house.

Quite a bit for the garden, including more tips - I think the garden is going to need a separate blog :)

Hmmm.... Water Saving Week was in June, just a few weeks ago as I'm writing this. I certainly never noticed. As the school reports used to say, Could Do Better.

Some good links - including Water Wise, the Consumer Council for Water, the Environment Agency, and the Bathroom Manufacturers Association's Water Efficient Product Labelling Scheme. I've already taken note of quite a few organisations around water - how many does the UK need, exactly? I bet they all have their own tips pages, as well.

There's a video! It says its on youtube, hmmm...and its Kate Humble. With water saving tips. Damn, I'm *definitely* going to make a page of tips.

Green features of plumbing

As my first project is an additional toilet, I tried to make a list of all the points I'd need to consider just for that. It didn't work out that way! I ended up starting a list about everything to do with plumbing, and although each of these will have their very own little blogpost eventually, this is it so far:

Policies and Design
- siting of all plumbing uses as close as possible to water sources, whether this means the water main or the tank. This minimizes "dead legs".
- integrating active and passive solar heating into the main system, including using a combi boiler.
- examining the treatment and re-use of black and grey water.
- materials used - plastic, ceramics, stainless steel, brass, titanium, granite, chrome, graphite. Are any of them greener than any other?
- knowing about the stop cock.
- the pros and cons of water meters.

Micro and macro, a miscellany
- energy efficient appliances.
- water butts.
- filtered water.
- waste disposal units. Oh dear...
- a strainer - basket strainer? - over all plugholes, to help prevent blockages, whether from human hair or kitchen waste.
- underground water tanks for rainwater storage.

Toilets
- a urinal at home!
- smaller cistern for toilets when refitting.
- using a hippo in larger, existing cisterns.
- dual flush.

Taps
- mixer or pillar taps? Monobloc? Disabled useage.
- aerating taps and showerheads.
- press taps or sensor taps, that switch off after a set number of seconds.
- pull-out spray and swivel spout.
- what type of valve inside the tap? Magnetic springs!
- inbuilt or add-on filtering and softening.