Home    Water Conservation    Students    Educators

H20 - What Do You Know?

Water - something we all too often take for granted. With spring and summertime upon us, water consumption is very high. Here are some conservation tips so that you too can help conserve . . .

• Take short showers instead of baths. A full bathtub requires about 36 gallons of water!
• Water lawns during the early morning or evening hours when temperatures and wind speed are the lowest. This reduces water loss from evaporation.
• Avoid flushing the toilet unnecessarily. Dispose of tissues, insects and other waste in the trash rather than the toilet.
• Store a pitcher of drinking water in the refrigerator rather than letting the tap run every time you want a cool glass of water.
• Don't hose down your driveway or sidewalk. Use a broom to clean leaves and debris. Using a hose to clean a driveway can waste hundreds of gallons of water.
• Encourage your family, school system, and community to help develop and promote water conservation.

Water Conservation Web Sites

This web site has been designed to enable teachers and students to access water conservation resources. This resource includes access to free information, articles, water conservation units, lesson plans, experiments, book list, and activities to help facilitate instruction of the concept of water. All the lesson plans are geared for K-6, however, most can be adapted to fit a specific level of instruction.

WaterSense/US EPA -http://www.epa.gov/watersense/

Check out the current WaterSense newsletter at: http://www.epa.gov/watersense/about_us/current.html

AMERICAN WATER WORKS ASSOCIATION - www.awwa.org

ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY OFFICE OF WATER - www.epa.gov/safewater

DOS AND DON'TS AROUND THE HOME - http://www.epa.gov/owowwtr1/NPS/dosdont.html

MassDEP -http://www.mass.gov/dep/water/wcplinks.htm

 

 

Help Conserve - together we all can make a difference!

Save Water - Save Money

Did You Know?

The average household spends as much as $500 per year on its water and sewer bill. By making just a few simple changes to use water more efficiently, you could save approximately $170 per year. If all U.S. households installed water-efficient appliances, the country would save more than 3 trillion gallons of water and more than $18 billion dollars per year! Also, when we use water more efficiently, we reduce the need for costly water supply infrastructure investments and new wastewater treatment facilities.

It takes a considerable amount of energy to deliver and treat the water you use everyday. American public water supply and treatment facilities consume about 56 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year—enough electricity to power more than 5 million homes for an entire year. For example, letting your faucet run for five minutes uses about as much energy as letting a 60-watt light bulb run for 14 hours.

By reducing household water use you can not only help reduce the energy required to supply and treat public water supplies, but also can help address climate change. In fact:

• If one out of every 100 American homes retrofitted with water-efficient fixtures, we could save about 100 million kWh of electricity per year—avoiding 80,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions. That is equivalent to removing nearly 15,000 automobiles from the road for one year!
  
  
• If 1 percent of American homes replaced their older, inefficient toilets with WaterSense labeled models, the country would save more than 38 million kWh of electricity—enough to supply more than 43,000 households' electricity for one month.

For more information, see Saving Water Saves Energy.