Improving My “Water Sense”

I’ve been paying close attention to three specific behaviors of mine (water bottle use, laundry machine use, and length of shower use) as a means of keeping in check my levels of water consumption. I thought that at this step in the challenge, I would at least be able to write in this blog that my behavior was EITHER rather easy or quite difficult. I am finding instead that both answers actually apply; if I am to be completely honest, there have been times in the challenge where I have found my task to be quite easy, and others where it seemed less so. Really, I think that it comes down to which particular task in my challenge I am trying to focus on, so I think it is best to talk about each on individually:

1)   The first task of my challenge is for me to stop buying bottled lower, made especially difficult by the fact that Lower provides it for me with such ease. This part of my challenge has been very easy for me to accomplish… until we started having that really great spring weather that prompted me to stay outside as much of the day as I possibly could. I was never tempted to purchase bottled water until I wanted to be able to stay outside all day in the son without dehydrating myself. I….er…. may have slipped up a few times on this one already.

2)   The second task of my challenge is for me to reduce the amount of water I use doing laundry by waiting longer between loads of laundry. This is the easiest for me to accomplish, I think because all I have to do is tell myself to be lazy and NOT make the walk downstairs to the laundry room quite as often… it doesn’t require as much inconvenience to implement this challenge as I believed it would.

3)   The last task of my challenge is to take shorter showers. This is probably the most difficult task, as it requires slightly more effort than the other two; it is not simply that I need to discipline myself to get out of the shower, but that I actually have to physically speed up the cumbersome process of washing my hair… I have so much, it takes some time! However, this task of the challenge is probably the one that I am doing the best in.

Though I have not been 100% successful in implementing these changes so far, I have noticed that just having to think about my challenge every time I drink water, do laundry, or take a shower has made me at least somewhat reduce my water consumption.

But even such small efforts can have a difference; After “testing my water sense” online with this quiz and game on the WaterSense website (a partnership organization with the EPA), I was surprised to see such high quantities of water being used in such basic situations such as having a slightly leaky toilet…so while I certainly need to make progress, I like to believe that my efforts so far are a step in the right direction!

Test your Water Sense: http://www.epa.gov/watersense/test_your_watersense.html

“Test Your Water Sense”. WaterSense: An EPA Partnership Program. United States Environmental Protection Agency. Web. 13 April 2014.