Water Conservation: Low Flow Toilets

I am still basking in the glow of our astounding water challenge success. I am also humbled by the awareness that some of my neighbors and friends have been conserving their water better than we have for a long time. The big conclusion for me is that it is possible to use substantially less water through unremarkable changes: washing clothes less (and only washing full loads), showering a little less and taking navy showers, and not flushing the toilet every time.

There is more to this story, however. On November 7^th of last year (2014), my favorite neighborhood plumbers Heise’s Plumbing  came by and installed 2 low-flow shower heads and 2 low-flow toilets. Thanks to the SFPUC website, I can see how our water usage changed with these new fixtures.  

Check out the reduction in our household water usage from November to December last year! Our December bill spanned November 15 – December 12. During that period, we used an average of 80 gallons of water per day compared to 174 gallons the previous month. That is about a 55% decrease in water usage from one month to the next.

You can see from the chart above, that the real impact is not that extreme, but in the 3 months prior to the toilet installation, we used in the ballpark of 150 gallons of water per day for our family of 4. Previously I noted that our family was using approximately 33 gallons of water per day per person up until the Water Challenge began in March, which took into account lower water usage since the HE toilets installation.

I just looked at our averages through last November when the low flow toilets and showerheads went in. I discovered that, from November 2013 through November 2014, our average water use was a little higher – 37 gallons per person or 158 gallons for our household each day.

Since November when the new toilets and shower heads were installed, we used closer to 100 gallons of water per day. We reduced our household water use by 30% with absolutely no behavior change other than having new toilets and showerheads installed. We reduced our water consumption from approximately 35 gallons per person per day to 25 gallons per person per day, or a ~7% reduction in water usage per person x 4. Toilets matter!

The Dirty about the Toilets:

I installed the Toto Eco Drake – model #ST743E tank andmodel #C744E bowl. I purchased these on the recommendation of Heise’s because they said, “They work well.” I agree. They get the flushing done. This toilet gets good reviews by other users too.

The toilets are single flush as opposed to the dual pee/poo settings that flush as little as .9 gallons of water. My toilets have the WaterSense sticker on them, indicating that they don’t use more than 1.28 gallons per flush, which is the standard to be considered a High-Efficiency (HE)toilet. (Mine use 1.28 gallons per flush.)

From what I understand, a standard toilet uses 3.5 – 7 gallons of water per flush. Who knew? I think some of my neighbors did, but I guess I wasn’t really paying attention, and no one I know has been talking about gallons per flush. Let’s talk toilet! I am sorry I didn’t replace my toilets sooner. I believe the low-flow shower heads are using less water too, although I would guess the bulk of our new water conservation is due to the HE toilets.

Start-up Costs:

I paid $370 per toilet. In looking around a little online today, I see I could have bought the toilets myself for around $250 and then just paid Heise’s to install them for me. I could even have installed the toilets myself, which I believe is fairly easy to do. But, I am lazy, and I love finished projects. With labor included, the total cost of this project was $1,250. The City of San Francisco gave me a $125 rebate for each toilet ($300 total rebate) to bring that back down to $950.

In looking through my new, favorite website some more – the San Francisco Public Utilities website – I just discovered it is even possible for some San Francisco residents to have a new HE toilet installed at no cost. You can find rebate information on this site too.

As I was looking around to find the best new toilets, I came across the Maximum Performance MaP website that tests toilets. It is a good resource for selecting a new HE toilet.

 More Questions:

For anyone else out there obsessing over their toilets: How has the installation of a dual-flush HE toilet impacted your water use? Are you seeing even more extreme reductions in water use than I am?

Ted Cruz, Neil deGrasse Tyson and a Country of Armchair Scientists: Do We Care Whether Environmental Policy is Scientific or Not?

This morning, a Facebook friend of mine liked the March 24 Washington Post article entitled, "Ted Cruz says satellite data show the globe isn't warming. This satellite scientist feels otherwise". 

 The author, Chris Mooney, is a journalist who is most well-known for his book The Republican War on Science (2005). In the newspaper article, Mooney describes several possible sources of climate data, satellite data being one source. He also describes how different people can have different perspectives on global warming based on looking at data from one year vs. trends over years and decades. Mooney ultimately criticizes Cruz for cherry picking data points and misinterpreting the Physicist Carl Mears' conclusions from his satellite data. Mears, whose data Cruz has used to argue that humans are not causing global warming, has said this conclusion is incorrect.

 A couple weeks ago, I had the thrill of attending Neil deGrasse Tyson's entertaining talk in San Francisco. Somehow, I managed to be the last person to ask him a question during Q and A. (OK, I climbed over a few people to exit my row and threw some punches.) My question: I just watched the Cosmos episode on global warming. How would you recommend applying what scientists are telling us in our day-to-day lives? In other words, can I make a significant impact with my own lifestyle changes? What kind of response should people like me - people who are not astrophysicists or climate scientists working on producing more data - do in response to what we know now?

Do you know what Neil - yes, we are now close friends - replied? He said, "Stay visible." He actually said that twice. Now, he was referring to how he would like me to continue standing while he answered another question, but Neil did admonish me to "Stay visible." These words have given me newfound direction in life.

Ultimately, Neil did not respond to specifics about personal behavior change. Instead, he focused on how important it is for the U.S.'s environmental policies to agree with emergent science. Our national policies should reflect a commitment to utilizing climate science to guide our actions in taking care of our planet.

"Emergent science" is not a single, recent data point. It is the general consensus of the scientific community today, based on multiple data sources, test re-test reliability, peer reviews and criticism. Understanding and using emergent science requires practicing science in our day-to-day lives. It means becoming scientists ourselves in how we interpret information and make decisions.

 With the tv and radio shows Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey and Star Talk, Neil deGrasse Tyson is urging us all to be better scientists. He is making science fun and accessible so that science will become more tightly woven into our cultural fabric. This was the theme of NDT's talk a couple weeks ago. He showed how scientific inquiry has changed over time and in different cultures of the world, producing more and less innovation. 

 Neil deGrasse Tyson wants to make us all better scientists so that we can analyze arguments better to distinguish between facts, spin, and conflicts of interest. More importantly, as better scientists, we will be more prone to promote politicians who will utilize emergent science to create effective policies and innovate on issues like global warming. This is where our impact could be significant.

Personally, I would like to believe that global warming isn't happening. I would like to continue doing whatever I want at all times. Because I want to. And I can. It makes my life more comfortable and free than probably most humans ever in the history of humans. But I see the polluted air hanging over my house, and I can't remember the last time it really rained, and I know I should pay attention to the scientists.

I am left with the questions: Do we value science enough to urge our politicians to use it? Are we willing to become better scientists as more and more information is available to us? Could Fritz Heider's idea of the "naive scientist" from the 1950s be more true today than it used to be? Or, are Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor still correct in defining us as "cognitive misers", creatures who won't think any more than they have to? To the degree that we are cognitive misers, will personal and community beliefs trump scientific inquiry in who we elect to create national policy?

Water Challenge: Results from Month 1

Well, the results are in! Our average water usage per person per day last month was 17 gallons. In one month, we were able to reduce our water consumption by 52%, and we moved a lot closer to the world average water consumption target of 13 gallons per day!

To sum up the results, our average water use per person in January-February was 33 gallons per day, compared to last month's (Feb. - Mar.) average of 17 gallons. I am honestly startled and encouraged by these results. I guess I haven't been paying as much attention to how we have used our water as I would like to think considering all the messages out there about California's severe drought. 

This is a family photo near a lake in the Sierra foothills, taken late February 2015. Note the buoy on the sand behind us that used to part of the swimming hole there.


The thing is, there is still plenty of room for improvement. For example:
*  We still watered our little yard last month. We could turn off the water entirely and only maintain plants that can survive without irrigation. This might mean killing off my 3 fruit trees and giving up on my berries and a few other vegetables we plant on occasion. It would also mean brown grass or the need to replace the grass with something else. Perhaps I will go back to backyard chicken farming and allow the entire space to become bare earth! We have maintained our little green patch for our kids to have space to run around in the backyard, but I don't think we would give up much to give up on green grass. I would be sad to see my plum, apple and lemon trees go, but perhaps they should.

Can we give this up? Probably . . .

*  We could simply continue to get better at flushing less often and also washing dishes and clothes less often. That is easy.

*  I haven't switched to using biodegradable soaps yet, but I could get more extreme and change all the products we use so that our gray water can get reused in other ways without concern about polluting the environment.

*  It would take more work, but we could save even more if it was possible to re-plumb our house so that kitchen sink and shower water could get re-used for irrigation and flushing toilets. (I also love the idea of an "endless shower" - a shower that continues to cycle the same water for x number of times, eliminating the guilt of a luxurious shower now and then. In talking with our contractor, I know the city of San Francisco does not officially allow this, but it would be fairly straightforward to include a switch system with a shower installation that allows for the homeowner to determine when fresh vs. recycled water gets introduced.)

*  We could utilize our rain barrel better to make rainwater our sole source of irrigation (when, in theory, it rains again). I know this is complicated when watering edible plants, but possible with some planning.

In the coming months, I will continue with the water challenge by obtaining a water conservation analysis from the SFPUC and also by attempting to keep a daily water usage diary. Send me your water challenge results and tips!

Water Challenge: Water Usage Update - March 9

We are now 24 days into our water challenge, and I am pleased to report that our average per person per day water use is down to 17 gallons. I haven’t started my daily diary – I am planning to start doing this during my next bill period beginning March 12 – but I have noticed a couple trends.

1.     We generally use less than 100 gallons per day for our household except on days when we do laundry. Those are the days that we have had our highest use days of just over 100 gallons.

2.     The other days I have noticed spikes are on days when we have been gone and our babysitter/cat sitter has stayed over. I believe this reflects water usage taking typical showers instead of navy showers.

My husband and I continue to feel our new water usage practices are sustainable, although we would still like the comfort of a shower that is warm. For this reason, we may invest in a tankless water heater. My husband remarked this morning that he felt weird yesterday when he took a regular shower because he has adjusted to the navy shower. I think this is true for me too. It is difficult to let the water run now that we are thinking about it more consciously. Thanks so much for ruining a perfectly good long, luxurious and hot shower! Ha ha. We actually don’t feel like we are missing much, and we feel good about paying more attention to wasting water.

Our kids are getting better about not flushing the mellow yellow too. I like that we are increasing their consciousness a bit, although we are not forcing them to take cold showers! Our kids typically take baths instead of showers, and so I save a little water by plugging the drain as the water starts flowing into the tub. Even though it is initially cold, I keep it turned to the hottest setting and let it fill until the too-hot water balances with the initial cold to result in a bath that is the right temperature. They take baths 1-2 times per week. Our friends from Barcelona reported that this is their typical bathing schedule.

More on Social Facilitation

This month as we have consciously thought about our water usage, I have noticed more discussion about ways to save water. It is not just the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission that is pushing for cultural change in our water use. A friend of mine recently posted on Facebook about a 90-something-year-old neighbor of hers who re-uses bathwater on her garden. There was some discussion about how soaps in the bathwater can hurt the garden. I haven’t tried this yet, but I am considering looking into biodegradable soaps for daily use – for bathing and also washing dishes and doing laundry. I believe it should be possible to reuse this gray water as long as we are careful about our soaps. I will be looking into this further. It is great to discover some members of my community discussing mundane details like this in the public sphere.

A week ago or so, my husband and I went out with our friends Bruce and Andrew, and of course, we started talking about what we are doing to try to cut out daily water use. I was pleasantly startled by how our friend responded when we told him about our new way of taking navy showers and not flushing the mellow yellow. He said, “Oh, we have been doing that for years. Isn’t everyone? We are in a drought!” They also enlightened me on flushing toilet paper. A household of boys may be able to go longer without flushing since they aren't using TP. Girls, we need to use less paper to decrease flushing. Is it possible to use 1 little square each time?

 Here I have been feeling so enlightened and great about our new water practices, and our old friend has been quietly doing this for MANY YEARS and assuming we have been too!? Similarly, my sister-in-law who grew up in Korea commented to me that it is simple to use less water, and she felt that water conservation is a cultural difference. She grew up saving water in more ways than people who grew up in the U.S. As a personal anecdote, one of my aunts once remarked that she would sometimes just let the water run out of her kitchen faucet while cooking because she liked the sound of running water! That was the 80s! I too am guilty of long, luxurious showers and bathing excessively, especially when I was a teen ager.

 I am more convinced after a few conversations with people in my community this month that we can use our water more efficiently by simply talking about our bathroom practices. When was the last time you engaged in potty talk with a friend? I think the time is right to go against what your parents always told you as a kid, "Stop the potty talk!" Actually, more potty talk, please!