You can also install a Clarkman garbage disposal in your shower and make salad in there.
I tend to be compulsive about brushing (although I don’t do it right so it doesn’t help much) and would keep brushing forever, so I turn the water back on after a little while to warn me to stop soon. So I guess I use a little more than I absolutely have to.
I let it run. It’s a timed, 2-minute brush. I don’t live in the desert. That may have something to do with it.
I brush fairly quickly, and I leave the tap on because I rinse frequently. So sue me.
Number one: I think it’s weird that people leave it running while they brush. It’s just running water that isn’t doing anything. Why do you do it? To save yourself two extra handle turns?
Number two: I can’t really feel too strongly about it. Water that runs into my drain doesn’t disappear from Earth. . .does it? Still, I’m not going to run water needlessly.
People may spit or dribble as they are brushing and it rinses right away. As opposed to it glomming in the sink and having to be wiped away later.
I have no problem with encouraging people to save water by not having it continuously flowing while brushing teeth, but if clean water is so “endangered” shouldn’t bigger water wasting issues be first addressed, like freaking lawns? Surely the amount of water used to basically made a big green block around people’s homes wastes orders of magnitude more water than any tooth brushing wastage?
Not around these parts, where water magically falls from the sky.
Who the heck takes 10 minutes to brush their teeth?
If you want to address the big issues, then you want to address Agriculture water. In CA, AG uses something like 3-4X more water than all Urban uses (inluding industry). The moral equivilant of “fixing the dripping faucet and not leaving your faucet running while your crush your teeth” if applied to AG water here in CA would save more water than all of the residential use.
At least growing grass helps with global warming. Well, maybe not so much in a desert.
Yes, and hosepipe bans are a familiar feature of a British summer. Thing is, a dryer-than-average winter is often the problem, because reservoirs do not get filled. Britain may have a damp climate, but we don’t actually get a huge amount of rainfall - even Manchester gets less than New York, for example.
2 minutes teeth brushing = perhaps 8 litres of water (estimated on the 30secs it takes for my basin to fill)? Use two litres instead, twice a day, and you save 4000 litres in a year.
Try something. Run that tap for two minutes into an empty gallon milk jug and see how many times you can fill it. My bet is two and a half times. Two and a half gallons of water going to literally no use at all.
Just sayin’.
I run the water extra long whenever I rinse anything down the sink, because I’m the designated household person who has to periodically clean the drainpipe out whenever it’s running too slow. If your bits of hair, toothpaste, and whatever other gunk make it just past the drain then stop in the pipe, they dry up on the walls of the pipe and build up over time. In my opinion, just running water down your drain is productive. I do it after I shave, and I do it while I brush my teeth, since that’s always after my wife has brushed hers (and she is not so concerned with the pipes, having a personal pipe consultant on staff).
You must have very hard water…
Thank you.
This is why I leave the water running - so when I hork toothpaste in the sink it’s whisked away, not left there to fester and ooze.
blech.
Rilchiam and Finagle know what part of the issue is here. The girl pisses me off for many reasons, and part of why I’ve ranted is to get it out so it doesn’t build up to the point where I verbally slaughter her for something miniscule, make her cry, make me feel bad and then have to find a new flat.
That said, whatever I think of the girl and her influence on my flatmate, this is an issue that annoys me on it’s own right. I’ve presented it as a conservation issue (which it is, Glasgow may be wet, but I wont drink from the Clyde when the reservoirs run dry in the summer), but it’s also a money issue. Our water’s metered, so it’s burning into the utility bill which I’m sharing. There’s not much truth to Scots being tight-fisted, but students certainly are when Christmas is coming.
Thank you for your link, jjimm I’ve got to fly home this weekend and I feel guilty about the journey so I’ll try and get carbon neutral now.
I dont pretend I’m a major conservationalist by any means, but simple stuff like not leaving your telly on standby, not leaving lights switched on and not leaving taps running isn’t exactly hard. People just need to switch on and maybe think for once.
I’d also like it if I didn’t find hairs in the plughole…
Now you’re just turning me on!
You must have seen that Seinfeld episode where Kramer did just that, and made a salad for some guests while taking a shower. One of them was an extreme germophobe, so when the guests were saying how good the salad was and he told them, “I prepared it as I bathed”, their reactions were predictable.
I still chuckle over that line. There’s a certain poetic gradeur to it in the context.
“I prepared it as I bathed”!
The “standby mode” on most modern electronic appliances uses on average about (IIRC) something like 40% of the appliance’s total usage. Leaving a TV (British venacular: “telly”) on standby for hours at a time wastes a lot of energy, pointlessly, as well as costing . It’s easier in the UK as most of our sockets have on/off switches, so we don’t have to unplug everything to prevent the waste of energy.
I know these considerations make many Americans scoff, but ten years ago I got some very good advice from an accountant in Ireland, that has stayed with me: she was helping me get a £4 tax rebate. When the paperwork started getting a bit much, I said “but it’s only £4”, and she replied “ah yes, but better in your pocket than theirs!” And how right she was.
