Green Household Ch.2

Continuing on from the last blog chapter 2 I wanted to continue to make changes in my home property in order to make my house greener.

Now with all the gardens and the warm dry summer approaching something I believe was important was to create a rainwater collector in order to keep a healthy garden and sustainably use of a water source to water them. The average household uses 320 gallons of water per day. 30% of which is used for outdoor reasons. I wanted to change this and reduce this number drastically by creating my rainwater collector. All I used was a plastic tub and set it outdoors. The first night I put it outside it sprinkled throughout the night. This lead to seeing the first bit of water collected!

This being my last post of Green Household chapter 2 I wanted to make some changes with in my home as well. The first thing I wanted to add inside my home was a shower timer. With their only being three of us, saving warm water for the next person is never a problem. This results in unnecessarily long showers. Showering is the third largest water user. Average shower uses 2.1 gallons of water per minute. I decided to create a timer for our showers. This was an easy task to add to our every day routines but while making a huge positive environment impact. Instead of using a normal timer I created a playlist of three songs that made up 10 minutes and Bluetooth this playlist to our shower speaker. This limited my shower to 10 minutes and throughout my shower I approximately knew how much time I had use and how much time I had left according to the songs that were playing.

The third and final green house improvement I wanted to make was to make changes to our presets of our dishwasher and washing machine. In this task I turned off pre-rinse and turned on air dry for our dishwasher. For our washing machine I changed double rinse to one rinse and turned the temperature to cold/warm instead of warm/hot. The average washing machine uses 40 gallons of water per load. A washing machine also uses 400 to 1300 W of electricity per load. A dishwasher uses 1200 to 2400 W of electricity per dish load.