Creating a green household takes commitment from everyone in the family, but it’s a great way to come together to do your part to help the environment. Enlist even the youngest members of the family to pitch in. With a little conservation effort, your family can save 10-20 gallons of water a day.

Cover the Pool

Pools obviously use a ton of water, but if you live in a place like Florida or Texas where you just can’t do without this summertime luxury, practice good pool stewardship to avoid losing water to evaporation or other means. When you’re considering pool designs Pensacola, think about what you really need. Do you need a deep end to practice your diving or do your kids just need a place to horse around with their friends? Selecting a slightly smaller pool design will not impact anyone’s ability to have fun. If you’re going to be away from your pool for more than a day or two, cover it up. This keeps the water in the pool rather than allowing it to evaporate into the air, and it keeps the water cleaner, meaning you won’t need to run the pump as long. Shorten the time the pump runs by skimming the majority of the debris off the top of the pool yourself. Choose an Energy Star-certified pump. There is a growing movement of pool owners who use natural rather than chemical means to keep their pools clean. Discuss this with your pool maintenance professional.

Capture Water

Even if you live in an area that doesn’t rain very much, it’s important to not let this free source of water go to waste. Install gutters around your home and focus the run-off into rain barrels. Water from the barrels can be transferred to a watering can and used in the garden or on household plants. Sink and shower water can likewise be captured with a small bucket placed under the faucets. While you’re waiting for water to heat up, you’ll be amazed at how much of it you were previously sending down the drain. These buckets of water can be added to the rain barrel for later use or used immediately for rinse water in the sink.

Plant Native Plants

Do your research to determine what trees, shrubs and flowers grow in your area naturally and focus your gardening efforts on these. Extend this idea even further by xeriscaping your yard, a popular alternative in arid regions. With xeriscaping, you may have to give up a grassy yard, but you gain drought-tolerant plants that require little maintenance and almost no water beyond what Mother Nature provides.

Install Low-Flow Appliances

When you imagined the low-flow shower heads of the past, you may have envisioned flat hair with traces of shampoo left in it. Luckily, low-flow showerhead technology has greatly improved over the last couple of years meaning that you’re not likely to even notice that you’re showering with less water.  Low-flow toilets also have gotten very good at their jobs, and they can save you up to 13,000 gallons of water per year. If you don’t want to invest in one now, make your own. Fill a one-liter water bottle with aquarium rocks to weigh it down, and then fill it with water. Set it in your toilet tank away from the flushing arm. This will fool your toilet tank into thinking it has filled up all the way making it low flow.

The water-saving technique you might notice the most is limiting your showers to 5 minutes. Make a game out of it for everyone in the family to see how much water you can save per week. Make a “shower playlist” with 2 songs that equal 5 minutes – 1 to wash and 1 to rinse.