Making every drop count
Water efficiency is more important now than ever before

I spoke last week at the PCBC Conference in San Francisco about water efficiency. Although buildings only account for about 15 percent of water use (in California, as per the USGS), conserving water in our buildings is becoming increasingly important. Global-warming-fueled droughts, changing weather and water pollution are pushing our finite water supply to its limit.

It’s important for architects and designers to take responsibility for this water use. Water-efficient faucets, toilets and showerheads should be standard practice (and are standard in states like California, by code).

This illustration (pictured above) best demonstrates how fragile our water supply really is. The blue marble (shown) represents all of the water on Earth. After all, we don’t make water. There is no new water. All of the water on the planet is all of the water we’ve ever had on the planet. The water in your glass may have been sipped by Thomas Jefferson, or in your case, peed out by a dinosaur!

Water is one of the most abundant resources on Earth, yet also one of the most scarce. Although water covers 70 percent of the planet, we cannot drink most of it. A whopping 97 percent of the water on Earth is in the ocean and undrinkable, and another 2 percent sits frozen in the polar icecaps (though not for long with global warming), leaving the remaining one percent for us to drink. Unfortunately, 70 percent of that remaining water is polluted. We are running out of fresh drinking water at an alarming rate.

Currently, some 20 percent of the world’s population (over a billion people) lack access to fresh water. Someone in the world dies of thirst every 8 seconds. A child dies of thirst every 15 seconds. Conserving water is more important now than ever before.

In the United States, we consume more water per person than any other country. The average American uses more water per day than someone in Brazil, Germany, China, Honduras and the United Kingdom combined. More so than anywhere else, conserving water here in the U.S. is not only important, but also necessary as we are consuming more than our share of clean water.

It requires an enormous amount of energy. Some 50 billion kW of energy are used each year to pump, process, clean, filter and transport all of this water. This equates to about a half pound of carbon dioxide for every gallon of water we consume. We can’t solve the energy crisis or climate crisis without addressing our relationship with water.

Our homes consume an incredible amount of fresh drinking water, and most of it is used in places it does not need to be so drinkable. You could easily cut household water use by 30 percent through water-efficient fixtures. I wanted to share some of my recent finds that have me excited about water savings:

More than a third of all of the water used inside your home is being flushed down the toilet, literally. We don’t need to flush with clean drinking water. We can use some of the soapy water (called graywater) that gets dumped by your laundry and shower. A dual-flush toilet (pictured) lets you choose a half or full flush, depending on your needs.

Then of course, we don’t need to use water at all. A waterless urinal (pictured) doesn’t need flushing and saves thousands of gallons of water a year, paying for itself in about three years. The Kohler urinal is a work of art.

Showers add up to nearly 20% of all indoor water usage and are the largest users of hot water. By simply installing an ultra low-flow showerhead, you can save up to 4,000 gallons of water annually, and for every gallon of hot water you can save, that’s gas or electricity you don’t need to use to heat it. You can beat the federally required 2.5 gallons per minute (gpm) with models that use 1.75 gpm.

Foot pedal controls are a nice design feature that also happen to save an incredible amount of water. While your hands are full with food or dishes, you simply tap the controls to release water only when needed.

Although dishwashers use only 2 percent of the water in your home, they do use nearly 20 percent of the energy. The new Bosch dishwasher is water- and energy-efficient in an incredibly attractive design.

Of course, there are a dozen simple things you can specify to cut water use and not sacrifice design quality. For the complete list of suggestions, you can download my slides from the lecture here.

—Eric Corey Freed is an architect and author of four books, including Green$ense for the Home.

At the 2009 West Coast Green Conference, I interviewed Gary Klein, one of the leading experts on water management who used to work for the State of California and is now Managing Partner of Affiliated International Management. He has taught me more about water as a resource than anyone else.

Here in his interview, you’ll hear Klein’s understanding of water and how the inevitable water crisis could be avoided:

This is an article I wrote for Natural Home Magazine’s 10th Anniversary Issue (coming out this month).

I interviewed:

Gil Friend, Natural Logic

Pliny Fisk, Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems

Sarah Susanka, Architect and best-selling author, The Not So Big House series

David W. Orr, Professor of Environmental Studies, Oberlin College

Michelle Kaufmann, Architect

Sergio Palleroni, Center for Sustainable Processes and Practices, Portland State University

FULL STORY HERE

I was interviewed in the New York Times to discuss my top things everyone should do to green their home. Rather than talk about adding solar panels, I thought it best to choose things everyone (including renters) can do to save money and our environment at the same time.

Five Beginners’ Steps to a Greener Home:
FULL STORY HERE

www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/garden/12greenhome.html

Pablo Paster writes a great look at the lifecycle cost of a bottle of water. This is a great look at how one would roughly look at the energy embodied in our products.

The biggest impact comes from the plastic bottle. Since plastic is made from oil, it requires energy (oil) to produce it. Since our water standards are so high in this country, the quality of these bottled waters is not much better than what comes out of our tap.

Water is one of the few substances on Earth that expands when it freezes. Most materials contract. (This is why you should not put a can of soda in the freezer…)

A simple but environmentally important and unusual property of water is that its common solid form, ice, floats on its liquid form. As a solid, water is less dense that as a liquid, thus why it floats. This is due to how the molecules arrange themselves when freezing. What is even stranger about this is that colder water is more dense than warmer water, until it becomes ice.

The Mpemba effect is the observation that, in some specific circumstances, hotter water freezes faster than colder water. Crazy, huh?!

The effect of dams have altered the rotation and speed of the Earth.

In Hong Kong, sea water is extensively used for flushing toilets citywide in order to conserve fresh water resources.

There is a misconception that a toilet flushes (or a tub drains) in a different direction when south of the equator. In reality, the Coriolis Effect is much too small compared to other influences on drain direction, such as the geometry of the tank; and the direction in which water was initially added to it.

Erosion formed the Grand Canyon.

It takes 23 gallons of water to produce a pound of tomatoes, it takes 5,214 gallons of water to produce a pound of beef.

Check out Dame Anita Roddick’s wonderful book on water.

In Architecture, we are always fighting gravity and water. Perhaps this is why I am so interested in them.

More on water…

Graywater, the collection of soapy sink and bath water to be reused to flush the toilets, is a great idea. After all, why do we waste clean drinking water to flush the toilet?

Currently, due to health concerns, Graywater is prohibited in California for use in toilets, but allowed for irrigation. For more info on using Graywater in California, click here.

WaterSaver Technologies has invented a brilliant solution. Their Aqus installs a small tank under your sink to collect soapy water. A tiny water line runs back to your toilet, feeding in the water.

Last month, the good folks at WaterSaver sent us a kit to install in our office. Just opening the box was amazing. It really is a wonder of ingenuity, from the instruction diagrams to the simple way the mechanism operates. We quickly learned it takes someone quite handy to install the device when I tried to dump the project onto our intern, Emily.

They debuted their wonder at West Coast Green last week, and it was the hit of the show.

Priced at under $200, the Aqus can save some of the 4.8 billion gallons of water flushed down U.S. toilets each day. Since water is still relatively cheap, they estimate a payback of four years, but given the low price tag, who cares?! The real beuaty of their invention is that is brings Graywater savings to any existing toilet.

Story at Treehugger
WaterSaver

California is the sixth largest economy in the world, and our population is growing daily. A byproduct of this is water use. Water is growing to be as scarce a commodity as oil.

The state is expected to add 11 million new residents by 2030, and a majority of them will live in the hotter, inland areas.

What is the main use of the 80-100 gallons of water they consume per person per day?
Not drinking water – but for watering their precious lawns.

The solution?
Stop putting in a green carpet of thirsty grass outside your home. It requires too much work anyway. Aren’t you tired of mowing the lawn every Saturday?!
Instead, plant a variety or local and drought-tolerant plants.

SEE:
Xeriscaping
Permaculture
Plants for California

Full Story