Water Conservation in the House

We had a load of water delivered to the house yesterday - about 4000 gallons.  Our cistern hold 3000, so we had the guy fill our other smaller tanks as well - two 350 gallons and one 250 gallon tank.  It's nice to have a full tank of water again, but it concerned us how quickly we burned through the last load.

Some water cannot be saved.  The livestock take quite a bit of water in the heat of the summer - especially the pigs who like to knock their water over to make a better wallow.  Just filling all of the troughs (and the wallow) takes about 50 gallons and we do that just about every day.  The washing machine is a top load washer and while we know how much we could save with a front load washer, the price is not in our budget at the moment.  So we have to figure about 30 gallons of water per load.  And with three boys and a very dusty farm, I do at least a load a day.

But there are places where you can save water quite comfortably.  So while we were in town yesterday, we got some of the supplies needed to reduce water usage in the house.  Here's a list of what we bought:

1.  Water conserving shower heads - brought usage down from 2.5 gallons/min to about 1.2 gallons/min.  The original showerhead was horrible for conservation.  The average ten minute shower was costing us 25 gallons!  The one that we got for our bedroom was made by WaterPic and actually had 5 settings that could be used at full force (1.2 gallons/min) or reduced to half (.6 gallons/min).
2.  Faucet aerator heads for all faucets - keeps the spray nice and strong but uses almost half the water.
3.  Toilet conversion kit - now, this was a real cool gadget we found called the HyrdoRight Dual Flush.  It takes the place of your original flapper valve in the tank of the toilet and you exchange your flush lever for a two-button system. When you pee, you use the small button and the gadget uses a small amount of water to flush (really just enough to refresh the bowl).  When you poop, you use the larger button and the gadget uses the full tank of water to flush.  It was super easy to install and it has a five year warranty so we figured it was worth a try.  So far, it's great!

We don't notice the difference when using these things in the house - they have very little impact on how you can use your water.  But in the grand scheme of things, we will be saving hundreds of gallons of water a month.  And when you live off-grid, that's HUGE.