Conserve Water In Your Kitchen With These Simple Steps

It can sometimes be difficult to visualize the importance and direct effect that simple conservation efforts can have when we are bombarded with negative information regularly. Let's analyze what a few changes in our own kitchen can make.

Clean vegetables in a bowl of water instead than running water. The water you used to clean vegetables can be used for your plants outside. Reusing water from rinsing out the coffeepot for outdoor plants, the compost or lawn is something we do all the time. The water used to rinse coffee pots is rich in nitrogen and other trace minerals, but it needs to be diluted with water before being used. Use the rinse water on different plants every day, and you will be surprised at the fact that you don't have to water or fertilize as much any more. Cooking water (pasta, steamed vegetables, boiled potatoes etc.) can be used in the same way - just let it cool first. All of these water sources contain extra nutrients that will aid your gardens immensely. Hot cooking water can be used in the garden to kill weeds.

After meals, scrape your dishes into the compost bucket before rinsing. Place soiled dishes and pots and pans in the sink while you rinse other items, so that they can pre-soak as you work on the others. Anything caught in the sink basket can be contributed to the compost, too.

If you wash dishes in a few inches of soapy water, you can save about 5 gallons of water per wash. If you turn your hot water faucet on, the temperature will naturally increase and maintain. This way you can avoid using another sink of water to rinse dishes. Rinse water is also great for hard-to-clean dishes that need pre-soaking.

The water used to rinse or soak dishes should be allowed to cool during the winter. This way it releases its valuable heat into the home, rather than the sewer. Dishwashers, that are not built-in, allow reuse of the water for pre-rinsing heavily soiled dishes because they drain into the sink. The water can be collected into a pot or the sink to release heat on a cold day. Of course, the opposite applies in the summer, when extra heat is not desirable.

Hot water is not always needed to rinse. Very often, the water doesn't really get hot until after we are finished doing dishes, so it never really serves its purpose. We can also conserve water by turning off the tap while soaping up. Running water is only needed to wet and rinse, and completely wasted in between.

Now, if you measured the amount of water saved each day by those simple methods we just described - there would be dozens of gallons of pure, drinkable water left untouched in the reservoir. By reducing hot water consumption, our energy bills are a little bit smaller. You can save this much just from your kitchen sink!


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