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Eco-friendly home: Clean, green bathroomsDid you know our bathrooms account for almost half the water used in Australian homes? |
| There are simple changes you can make to save water – and turn your house into an environmentally friendly room. Here at Light Home, we’ve been working our way around a typical house, researching how you can make your home more eco-friendly. The basics for the bathroom are: minimise water usage and don’t throw loads of chemicals down the sink. Eco friendly toilet: save on flushingMillions of litres of unnecessary water is flushed down our toilets every week.While more modern toilets save on water with dual flush devices, installing a simple toilet water saver in older loos will save water every time you flush. If you are looking to design an environmentally friendly home, Queensland-based WaterWizz’s toilet water saver can be used in old or new toilets and will save up to 70% of water on every flush. There are even toilets available now that feature a small hand basin above the cistern. The Caroma Profile™ toilet suite, for example, has a 5-star WELS (Water Efficiency Labelling and Standards) Scheme rating. The same water is used twice – firstly for hand washing and secondly to flush the toilet.  Save water when you showerThere are lots of devices on the market to help you use less water in the shower. If you have an older style showerhead, it’s worth replacing it with an eco friendly water-saving showerhead, which will help to significantly reduce your bathroom water consumption.Water-saving showerheads can save litres of water for every minute they are used. A WELS 3-star rated showerhead, for example, will use six litres of water per minute, compared to a zero rated showerhead, which can use more than 15 litres per minute. The WELS Scheme’s website has a tool that enables you to search for a water-saving showerhead by its WELS rating (its efficiency and flow rate) and brand.  Another tip for saving water in the shower is to install a timer. Waterpebble measures how much water is going down the plughole and remembers how much you use. It has a set of traffic lights to count down to let you know when to finish showering, and each time it fractionally reduced your shower time. Green bathroom productsUsing eco friendly bathroom cleaning products makes a huge difference to what ends up in our waterways and sea.Environmentally friendly options on the supermarket shelves include Ecover, Seventh Generation and Shaklee. But why not go super-eco and save money too – basic products like baking soda and vinegar will clean almost everything in the bathroom. |
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