…mellow. If it’s brown flush it down. I have always wanted to do this. And with the Brisbane water crisis now is a great time to start. I never thought that Rachel would go for the idea, but I was so excited when she started doing it first. If everyone can agree in the house then this is a great idea. Not to be imposed on guests though, I would think. They can just go outside on the lemon tree.
We have also started doing the bucket in the shower thing and I am simply horrified at how quickly that it fills up. Easily 2 buckets a day. We put it on the plants. Another great idea that one of our customers does is to use the shower water in the toilet. They just turn the tap off to the Tank part of the toilet, and after a brown flush, you just manually fill the tank up again with one of the buckets from the shower. Their son came up with the idea I think. He is 12.
We have been doing this in our household for a little while now — and it is truly amazing how much water must be getting saved. It really isn’t a lot of work to use the bucket in the shower, and as you said, it is amazing how fast it fills up.
The idea of the 12 year-old is great.
This is the sort of stuff we should be seeing the council promoting. Hopefully it’ll take off in brisbane soon, because this situation with the water is getting worse by the day.
Congratulations, Morgs. It’s not such a difficult barrier to get your loved ones to participate in the water saving activities that are so necessary at the moment. I mean really - flushing perfectly good drinking water down the sewer every time you wee doesn’t make sense does it? You kiss and hug your loved ones, it’s not so bad looking at their wee - it’s all pretty much the same considering the household’s diet is the same…
Just out of interest, my rates bill came in a few weeks ago and I saw how much we had saved by doing the ‘little things’ - this time last year we were using 326 litres a day (Me and my two small boys), now we using 71 litres a day - can you believe it?????
I’ve been living on rainwater (tanks) for the last couple of years (we are not on the water grid) and you really get to know the value of water … and the joy of rain! We end up doing all sorts of creative water reuse, it’s an obsession really. Anyway, good on you Morgs! (btw, my neighbour here gave himself a water budget of 10L per day: one bucket. I’m not sure how much we use, quite a luxury really when you think of it).