Green Toilets: How to Save Money and Water from Going Down the Drain

If you have a large family, you should consider sometime doing a tally of how many times per day you flush a toilet in your home. Multiply this by up to 7 gallons of water per flush, depending on how many gallons your particular toilet uses, and you will find how many gallons of water per day your family uses to flush the toilet. In most families, about 1/3 of the water used indoors is used just to flush the toilet, adding up to huge amounts of wasted water over the years, in addition to expensive water bills. Luckily, there are a number of ways for you to reduce the amount of water you use in your toilets and be friendlier to the environment.

Conserve Water in Your Toilet: Low Flush Toilets

Most toilets manufactured in the last 15 years for use in residential homes are ultra low flush toilets that use only 1.6 gallons of water per flush, as opposed to the up to 7 gallons that older toilets use. If you want to go all the way to the green end of things, consider replacing your toilet to save thousands of gallons of water per year.

Conserve Water in Your Toilet: Make a Low Flush Toilet

If you don't have the money to replace your toilet, there are a couple simple modifications that you can carry out to reduce the amount of water that is used each time you flush. One method is to use a toilet dam, which keeps the reservoir of the toilet from completely filling up with water. These are available for purchase at home improvement stores and are easy to install at home.

Another more crafty option for making a low flush toilet is to simply fill a few 1 liter plastic bottles with water and put them in the bottom of your toilet's reservoir. For every bit of water inside the bottles, you will be saving that much water from flushing down the toilet each time you pull the handle.

Conserve Water in Your Toilet: Don't Flush Every Time

Flushing the toilet only every other time you use it will mean that you are using half of the water you previously did for flushing your toilet. Every third time will cut it further, to just about 15% of your overall household water use. Of course, there are some times when you just need to flush, and you should watch out to not accumulate too much toilet paper, but in most cases it won't hurt a thing or cause bad odors if you don't flush every time you use the toilet.

Conserve Water in Your Toilet: Flush With Recycled Sink Water

If you want to be really radical about things, you can actually stop using water entirely to flush your toilet. This can be done by disconnecting the plumbing of your bathroom sink so that it drains into a large bucket under your sink instead of into the pipes. Then when you want to flush your toilet, just pick up the bucket and dump some of it into the toilet bowl to get a solid flush. Most families, between washing hands and brushing teeth, use enough water in their sinks to flush the toilet, as long as you aren't flushing every time you use it. This is the best way to conserve water flushing your toilet!