In light of California's historic drought and Governor Brown's executive order to impose a 25 percent reduction on municipal water use, my partner and I thought about ways we can conserve more water than we already do.
The "problem" we have is that like many long-time California residents who have been through droughts before, water awareness and conservation is very much ingrained in our daily routines. We don't flush the toilet unless necessary (and have a low-flow toilet), we don't have house plants that need watering, we don't take showers every day (and keep them short when we do), and the three sources of water in our apartment are equipped with low-flow faucets (provided for free by the SF PUC!). The one in our kitchen sink even has a convenient switch to cut off water during dish-doing unless you absolutely need it.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
After some brainstorming — including a wee bit of righteous indignation about how this mandatory 25% cut shouldn't really apply to those of us who have been tightening our faucets all along — we discovered a weak spot in our system:
Living on the 2nd floor of an old building where the water heater is in the garage means that it takes quite a while for warm water to move through the pipes. While that's not a big issue in the kitchen sink (plates and utensils are pretty immune to cold-water shock) or bathroom sink (no problem washing your hands or brushing your teeth with cold water), the shower is a different story. Despite my overlapping cultural heritage with the purveyors of the Kneipp therapy, I prefer to keep my full-body cold water exposure to the hottest days of the year, of which we don't have that many in foggy San Francisco.
Thus our decision, starting today, to capture the initial stream of cold shower water with a bucket.
Clik here to view.
Now, I can hear the voices all around me, including the ones in my head, screaming in bloody cynical unison, right below the orange cynicloud:
