By Mary Wible Brennan, Durham, NC

I’m astounded that my neighboring city of Raleigh had record water usage this month IN THE MIDST OF A RECORD BREAKING DROUGHT! The main water supply in Falls Lake will run ‘dry’ in January without a significant rainfall yet people still want to water their lawns and wash their cars.

My grass is brown and it crunches underfoot, our car a dusty green, rain barrels are empty, but even in this drought, my tomatoes and young dogwood and magnolia trees are not too stressed. Our family secret: gray water.

Gray water is the term for all the water that exits your house except from the toilets (wasting water from toilets is another story for later). In a formal gray water system, the water from your sinks, showers, dishwasher and clothes washer is diverted into a cistern and stored for later usage. We are not prepared to invest in the infrastructure right now, but are using our own primitive system of recycling our used water.

Our entire family has permanently and seriously decreased time in the shower, but because our poorly designed plumbing system makes it hard to turn water off and back on to soap up (read about Navy Showers), so we’re not saving as much as we could. My children still take baths occasionally (in non-drought times) and after one “accidentally” filled up tub (how else would an 8-year old practice playing shark?) instead of the usual few inches of “splash and clean”, we had gallons of literally gray water. Alright, I decided, bucket brigade. My son and I scooped up water in buckets, tromped outside and watered plants. Since we use primarily Dr. Bronner’s Magic (organic and biodegradable) soap, I knew it would be fine for the plants, and according to a friend, the natural essential oil would probably keep voles from gnawing at the roots.

Several sloshy trips later, the tomatoes were watered and a galvanized tub on our deck filled with a backup supply. The inevitable splashes of water through the house even helped clean the floors and the heavy buckets added a bit of exercise to our evening - double duty!

Since then, we have been working on incorporating the bucket brigade into the evening routine. Showers, except on rare occasions, have replaced baths, but the kids plug the tub to catch the extra water. It does not always work when everyone is tired or when siblings don’t want to stand in the others dirty water, but overall, we’ve got it down. And, during this exceedingly dry time, my tomatoes are happier, my young dogwood is no longer wilting, the rhododendron is saved and most importantly, my children are much more conscious of the water they use and feel empowered by it rather than stressed out by the situation.

Little things we’ve always done to conserve feel even more purposeful now. We’ve made a formal policy of ‘if it’s yellow let it mellow, brown flush it down’ mantra instead of just occasional. When clearing glasses from the table, the leftover water goes into the pet’s bowls or on the house plants. Showers are even shorter and sometimes skipped altogether. No one runs a load of laundry (in our front loading washing machine) without it being stuffed full of clothes.

We will most likely keep these habits post-drought since it has been fairly easy and feels right. I hope that we can inspire friends and family to take on the conservation challenge and discover the same thing. They say it takes 30 days to change a habit, maybe times like this can serve as opportunities to rethink our use of this precious resource.

Tags: community, culture, home

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 28th, 2007 at 12:35 pm and is filed under Green Misc.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.