Eco-Coach

Green your life at home, work & play

The Easiest Way to Save Water is to Install Aerators on Your Faucets! September 27, 2007

Filed under: Green home, Green living, Green tips, Water conservation — jokosmides @ 5:43 pm

This could potentially cut your water usage in half. Older faucets can use between 3 and 7 gallons per minute. Low-flow faucet aerators use as little as 1.5 gallons of water per minute.

aerator.jpg

Aerators can easily be screwed into your existing faucets. Your faucets (most faucets) in kitchens and bathrooms, usually have standard size outlets with threads inside the outlet for screwing in an aerator. If an aerator is in place, it will have writing on the outside of it, telling you what its “rated flow” is. It’s measured in GPM (gallons per minute). If a faucet is to be considered “low-flow”, it’s rated at 2.5 GPM or lower. If it’s already got an aerator and its rate is higher than 2.5, replace it with a low-flow version.

How to install an aerator: It’s simple. Just wrap some pipe compound or pipe tape around the screw threads of the faucet and screw on the aerator. Run the water to make sure there are no leaks. If this causes your faucet to leak from the base, then tighten that area too. This may require a wrench and some elbow grease, but it’s not too bad.

US indoor residential water usage is estimated to average 80 gallons per person per day in homes without efficient fixtures. Installing aerators will save you money and save water.

 

How Green Is Your Gadget? September 21, 2007

Greenpeace recently released the 4th edition of the “Green Guide to Electronics” and it has already caused quite a stir among the ranked. The scorecard – applied to the top 14 manufacturers of PCs and cell phones – evaluates companies based on their use of toxic materials, electronic waste and takeback/recycling programs for outdated products. Former front runner Dell dropped to number two, while Nokia took the top spot and Sony Ericcson came in third. Worst on the list? Panasonic, with HP and Apple close behind. The guide seems to be meeting its goal of greening the tech industry since Dell just announced that the company will go carbon neutral by 2008, no doubt as a result of this blemish on its green image.

Image from previous edition

Hopefully other companies will follow suit and aim to be on the Green Electronics Council’s Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) list which currently consists of 579 products. The list spurred sales of 36.5 million EPEAT-registered products in 2006, saving 13.7 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity. That’s enough to power 1.2 million homes for a year!