Piper, aged 2 and a half, has switched from baths to showers to save water like the rest of the family.  So I will no longer be able to siphon her bathwater out into the garden.  We’d better get that Water Two valve fitted pronto!

And on the subject of water saving, we’re still waiting for our Water Worm hoses from www.evengreener.com, ordered back in May, to fit to our water butts and snake through the garden as a passive irrigation system.  I managed to speak to someone at their call-centre last week who said he’d be back in touch when he knew what was going on with our order, we haven’t heard from him since. 

We’ve hit a snag with the installation of the Water Two valve that we’ve been so excited about.  The grey-water pipe that we had planned to fit it too is a "dead" pipe with no water flowing through it, and the pipe that carries the basin- and bathwater is too short to attach valve.  So, we need to extend that pipe, reduce the height of the hopper, and then fit the Water Two.  This won’t be happening for at least a few weeks, hence the need to start siphoning bathwater into the garden with a hose.

I have finally taken the lead from my friend Ilse and am siphoning bath and shower water into the garden to water the parched lawn.  Ayrton and I have it down to a fine art already after only two go’s.

The easy no-sucking way to siphon water from your bath to your garden (you need two people):

1. Cut a piece of hose long enough to reach well into your garden, all the way up the wall and through the bathroom window into the bath.
2. Person 1 is in the bathroom and holds the hose to the tap until the water runs through to the other end of the pipe.
3. Once the water is flowing through, Person 2 in the garden puts their thumb over the end of the hosepipe and shouts up for Person 1 to switch off the tap and submerge their end of the pipe into the bathwater.
4. The vacuum created will suck all the water out of the bath and into the garden below.

Our Water Two valve arrived in the post yesterday.  What a clever little contraption!  It is a switch that you fit to your bath/shower waste-water pipe that you can switch on and off to divert the grey water to your water butts when there isn’t enough rain.  We hope to have it fitted within the week, and I’ll post a picture once that’s done.

I like to think so.  We use eco-friendly cleaning products, sustainable DIY products and natural materials in our home.  Yesterday I bought a new bottle of Ecover washing up liquid that had a leaflet attached to it asking me whether mine is a healthy home and inviting me to enter a competition to win a top-to-toe house clean plus a hamper of Ecover ecological cleaning products.  I entered the competition, and thought that I’d check whether Ecover considered my home to be healthy, by working through the checklist on their website.  I may even add what we are doing in our "Done & Doing" list, and those that we are still working towards on our "Forward Thinking" list.  Here are my findings:

Bedroom

Unplug your chargers and transformers when they’re not being used. All those little power supplies to charge cell phones, toothbrushes, and other personal gadgets are burning energy when they’re not in use.

 Yes, this is something we do religiously.

Change conventional light bulbs for new energy efficient ones. They can last ten times longer and keep the equivalent of half a ton of CO2 out of the atmosphere over its lifetime.

We’ve changed about 80% of our light bulbs to energy efficient ones, and the figure is still rising.

Draw your curtains at dusk when its cold outside to stop heat escaping through windows – that way your room will be cosier come bedtime!

Pete and I still don’t have curtains in our bedroom, neither does Ayrton (we only have blinds), so only Piper is achieving this energy saving in her bedroom.  We are planning to put curtains into both of these bedrooms before the winter.

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Living Room

Re-use or recycle more of your household waste a scrunched up dry newspaper is great for cleaning windows, and you can still recycle it afterwards.

We recycle all paper and newspaper with our local authority kerbside collection scheme.

On bright days open curtains and blinds to let the sun warm your home for free. Even on cold winter days, sunlight streaming through a window into a room can raise the temperature by several degrees and all that sunshine will cheer you up too!

Sunshine is very welcome in our home.

Turn off lights and other electrical appliances like televisions and dvd players when you’re not using them. Its pretty obvious but surprising how many times we forget.

We try to achieve this, I am in the habit of switching things off, but it can be harder to get the children to remember to do it.

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Kitchen

Consider home composting your kitchen waste - as well as fruit and vegetable peelings you can compost egg cartons, coffee grounds and teabags too. Up to two-thirds of food each household throws away could be composted.

We compost and vermi-compost kitchen waste (including cooked vegetable matter in the wormery).

Remember to help conserve water when you wash your dishes. When you wash your dishes by hand, remember to turn your tap off in-between rinsing. And don’t rinse dishes before you put them in a dishwasher - that’s what the machine is designed to do - just scrape all the excess food off the dishes and let the machine do the rest.

Our Miele AAA-rated dishwasher saves us around 400 KWh of electricity (worth £30), 7,000 litres of water (equivalent to 40 baths) and 500 hours (3 weeks) of our time every year.  I’ve also stopped rinsing everything before it goes into the machine since I started concentration on saving water around the house.

Save cash and energy with each cuppa - just boil the amount of water you need for one cup of tea/coffee, rather than a full kettle every time.

We bought an Eco-Kettle about a year ago after the demise of our previous kettle, so are saving lots of electricity for every cup of tea we have.

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Utility Room (or the under-stairs cupboard in our house)

Try not to wash clothes just for the sake of it - outer layers of clothing can be worn more than once without laundering, sometimes its just habit to take things off and chuck them in the wash basket.

Penney Poyzer’s "smell test" is applied to all items of clothing that don’t have obvious dirty marks.

Consider switching to an ecological washing detergent like Ecover’s. If everyone in the UK switched to an ecological washing powder we would eliminate the equivalent of 700,000 tons of detergent from our sewerage plants and waterways each year.

We currently use Ecover’s non-biological washing powder and fabric softener.

Give the tumble dryer a rest - it’s the second biggest household energy user after the fridge. Dry your clothes outside on fine days and invest in clothes airer to dry your clothes inside on a rainy day.

Already doing this too, we’ve never had a tumble dryer and didn’t bother getting a new switch for the dryer part of our washer/dryer when Piper broke it.

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Bathroom

A shower uses 2 / 3 the amount of water as a bath – keep it short and turn off the shower head while soaping to earn extra karma points!

We all shower 99% of the time, except for Piper who is still too small and has a small daily bath.  I don’t relish the idea of shivering with the water off while I’m soaping up, but do use the "eco" setting on the shower that slows the flow and reduces the temperature of the water by a few degrees.

Start reading the labels and avoiding harsh chemicals – Chlorine in particular is one of the nastier chemicals found in bathroom cleaners – and subsequently in sewers.

You won’t find any nasty chemicals in our bathroom.

Keep your hot water heater down to 130°F (54°C). This is hot enough to kill bacteria and still save energy.

I have ours at 45′C.  What bacteria?  I always mix the hot with cold anyway!

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Toilet

Use white recycled toilet paper - colour dye in the paper is just more unnecessary chemicals for the environment to deal with. If you don’t think it’s significant, imagine the amount of paper 50 million people in the UK flush into the sewerage works and the sea every day!

Tick that box!

To keep the air smelling sweet don’t reach for the air freshener - hang an orange studded with cloves and rolled in a mixture of cinnamon and orris root powders in the room and replace every few months.

I mix up some water with essentials oils in a spray bottle for the worst smellies, and the window is open all summer.

Simply filling a one litre bottle with water, replacing the cap and carefully placing in the cistern will save one litre of water per flush.

There’s a Hippo in our cistern.

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Garden

Re-use bits of household rubbish in the garden - ice-lolly sticks are great for labelling plants, old egg boxes can be used as seed trays. Plastic soup containers, yoghurt pots and cut down milk cartons all make good flower pots.

Wherever possible we are already doing this.

When you have to water your lawns ad garden, water very early in the morning or late evening to reduce evaporation.

I’m not always so good at this one, I water whenever I can, usually quite early at the allotment (8.30-ish) but the home garden often is watered during the afternoon.  I will try harder!

Set the blades a little higher when you mow your lawn, then it will require less watering and provide a better habitat for fauna.

The lawn is Pete’s obsession, often a bit of an irrational one, he likes it neat and short and perfect.  What to do?  He’s a pretty good greenie most of the time.

I came across this water-use calculator on the FOE forum, and was horrified to find that we are still using around 90 litres per person per day even with our water saving efforts.  Must try harder!

We ordered two 30-metre long water worm hoses and a compost trowel from evengreener a few weeks ago, and yesterday I got a letter from Blackwall (the company behind evengreener), telling me that my two 15-metre length water worms, compost trowel, two water-butt emptiers and compost caddy were not going to be delivered for up to 6 weeks because there is such a backlog on orders with all the water butt panic buying that has been happening lately.

Never mind, we seem to be getting a fair amount of rain at the moment and so the garden and allotment are not requiring much watering. And I called Blackwall today to let them know what my order was actually supposed to be, so I should eventually be getting the longer water worms and compost trowel minus the extra stuff I didn’t order.

I was talking about gardening with a good friend on the telephone tonight, and she told me that they are siphoning their children’s bath water out of the bath, through the window and into a drum on a wheelbarrow directly below.  They then wheelbarrow the water to wherever they want it, and it is enough water for their entire vegetable patch every day.  What a brilliant idea, we are going to give it a go ourselves.

Our local water supplier has announced a hopepipe ban for all its customers, which has got me thinking that’s it’s about time we fitted our passive irrigation system.  We already have one water butt, and are waiting for another one that we ordered through the local council’s subsidised water butt scheme.  Once that is installed for the overflow from the first water butt, we can fit the irrigation system.

The system that we intend to use consists of a porous hose made from recycled tyres that is connected to the water butt and then snaked amongs the plants and mulched over.  Then all you do is open the tap on the water butt and sit back to let your garden water itself.

I have also been reading up on water conservation in the garden and happened across Jane Perrone’s article in the Guardian that gives some very practical tips in dealing with the water shortage that we are experiencing.