Twelve Months of Earth Day: June edition

We did complete our first month of May for Being mindful of our water use! We all were surprisingly good about being mindful! It’s possible there were lower expectations for certain teenagers in the household, but they aced it and were wonderfully responsible.

Here’s how we did against all our goals:
Making new habits

Shorter daily showers: 3 minutes
We reduced our showers by a 2 minutes each! That may not sound like a big deal, but every minute the shower runs, its releases 2.5 gallons for a standard shower head, and 1.8 to 2.0 gallons for a water sense shower head. We all reduced our showers by 2 minutes. That’s 3.6 gallons per person, for one shower, and that’s 108 gallons for the month for one person, taking a shower everyday! And we’ve just become mindful and it really has become a habit!
So we’re now saving almost 400 gallons a month by reducing our showers by 2 minutes!
And it wasn’t that difficult, and once or twice a month we allow ourselves to go over. It helped that we started to reduce it by a minute, and then increased it slowly to 2 minutes. Some days the teenagers even reduced showers by 3, 4 minutes, shocking!
Reduce hair wash shower by 5 minutes
We reduced it by 3-4 minutes on average, and started at about 2 minutes.
 We’re thrilled and no, we’re not missing those extra minutes.
Add a shower bucket and use it to water the plants
The shower buckets were challenging because they need to be carried over to the yard, and pots, and they get quite heavy for some of us, so we tried a few times and decided to stop.


Scrape our dishes instead of rinsing

We’ve definitely started doing more of this, though its not always feasible or ideal, but when we do it, it does save water!

Use cold water washes for everything possible.

We do this for most of the loads for laundry, and we’ve increased it a little bit more since we started this project.
Run full washer/dishwasher loads.
Yes, we definitely did this and continue to do so!

Revisit our yard and sprinkler time.


We did reduce these slightly
Do regular leak checks
Leak checks passed!
 And we added to our monthly checklist.
Line dry clothes
We ended up not doing this one unfortunately. With life and work challenges and the time things take, it all adds up and it wasn’t quite feasible for us to do this at this time. But its on our list to get to!

Long Term

Replace shower heads with lower flow heads
We checked our shower heads and we already using water sense shower heads, who knew!
Divert roof top spout to our yard
This one is in the plans, and may get done in the future.
Add aerators to our faucets
We already had them, so good to know!
Revisit our sprinkler system
Another one for the future definitely!
We’re all definitely happy with our short showers! And we didn’t think we would be, and its good to know that we’re saving water.
We will post the difference in our water bill later in June, as we haven’t quite received it.
We were also happy to reach the end and move to another month of mindfulness!

Our new month of mindfulness is: Being mindful energy use at our home.

We’ve brainstormed some ideas below:

Making new habits

• Scan and unplug as many appliances as we can, that we don’t use regularly.

• Charge our all our rechargeable devices during the day, so we can use solar power to power them, and leave them unplugged otherwise

• Run most of our regular use appliances: washer, dryer, air conditioner, coffee maker, dishwasher during the day.

• Watch less on the TV/ipad/phone, consume less media! (One can try…)

• Use our ceiling fans

• Check all our light bulbs and replace with LED as needed

• Take cooler showers!

• We already did these last month and plan to going forward too, but we can remind ourselves about colder laundry loads, less drying in the dryer, full loads!

Long Term
Installing a battery for storing our solar energy and being off the grid entirely!
This month we are planning to track how much energy we release back to the grid and we will share how we did for June compared to months before.

These are heartbreaking times too, in our world, our country, and we want to remember too, that we’re here to celebrate all our differences, and there is no world where we can be sustainable without a shared path.