Ways To Conserve Water and Electricity

Over our years of helping residents with ways to conserve water and electricity, we’ve accumulated quite a list of tips, tricks and hacks to save water and electricity and reduce utility bills. The following recommendations will help you reduce your utility costs without altering your lifestyle.

Ways To Conserve Water and Electricity

Ways To Conserve Water

In The Kitchen

Install a “Low-Flow” faucet aerator in your kitchen faucet. They can be ordered from amazon.com or picked up at your local home improvement store. These types of aerators are one of the best ways to conserve water and can cut your water usage in half.
Scrape left over food into the trash and don’t rinse dishes before loading them into the dishwasher. Rinsing is not necessary because today’s dishwashers and detergent are designed to breakdown leftover food.
Don’t hand wash your dishes of you have a dishwasher. A dishwasher uses much less water, only about 3-4 gallons per cycle. Hand washing and rinsing a meal’s worth of dishes, silverware, pots and pans often requires over 25 gallons.

In The Bathroom

One of the fastest and easiest ways to conserve water in the bathroom is to install a “Low-Flow” faucet aerator in your bathroom faucet. As in the kitchen, these types of aerators can cut your water usage in half.
Low-flow aerators can also be installed in shower heads, again, cutting usage in half.
Make your toilet more water efficient! yes the toilet. Older toilets have large tanks that use a lot of water per flush, up to 5 gallons. Today’s efficient toilets with smaller tanks use much less water. These more efficient toilets use only 1.6 gallons of water per flush by law. If you have an older toilet with a large toilet tank, another one of our ways to conserve water is to fill a few plastic plastic soda bottles with rocks and water, and screw the lid on tight. Place them in the toilet tank to reduce the amount of water the tank holds. This will reduce the amount of water your toilet will use every time it is flushed.
Another one of the ways to conserve water is to test your toilet for leaks. It’s easy. Just add some food coloring to the water in the tank and then check the water in the bowl every 15 minutes for a couple of hours to see if any of the colored water from the tank has leaked into the bowl without the toilet being flushed. Toilet leaks can account for a lot of wasted water.
Also make sure your sink and tub faucets are not dripping. 1 drip every minute can add up to a gallon of waisted water per day.

In The Laundry

At one point or another, we’ve all needed that one shirt or dress washed and dried quickly, but just washing 1 article of clothing is terribly wasteful. Mainly due to the water use of the washer, especially if you use hot water. If you have a traditional top load washing machine, it can use as much as 60 to 120 gallons for a complete cycle. Do you really want to use, (and pay for) that much water to wash one or two articles of clothing? And if you are using hot water, add the cost of the electric to heat the water. If there is nothing else to add to the load, adjust the settings as best you can to speed wash and use cold water.

Ways To Conserve Electricity

In The Kitchen

Today we have all kinds of small kitchen cooking appliances. Instapot, Ninja, small air fryers and microwaves and others that actually cook food faster and healthier than a conventional electric oven. Cooking with these small appliances or your microwave uses much less energy than a conventional electric stove or oven. They don’t have to be pre-heated and in most cases will cook food faster.
If you can’t avoid using the stove or oven, be sure to use the lids of your pots and pans when cooking. This traps heat and cuts down on cooking time.
Most people never think of this but it can save a lot of energy. Clean the protective grill at the bottom front of your refrigerator and vacuum the dust off of the cooling coils behind the grill. This will help your fridge operate more efficiently. If your fridge is an older model, look for coils on the back of your refrigerator.
It’s common for people who have their own place to only use a small portion of their refrigerator. If your fridge or freezer is not packed full and you have a lot of empty space, fill up that empty space with plastic gallon jugs or 2 liter bottles of water. The goal here is to fill the empty areas with water. Here’s why – when you open your refrigerator or freezer, a lot of cold or freezing air escapes and room temperature air replaces it. If you fill all of the empty space that you are not using with water, this transfer from cold air to room temperature air does not happen. The cold or frozen water jugs will also help the fridge and freezer recover to the temperature it is set to faster.
Refrigerators can leak cold air! Check the gasket around the edges of the door(s). As they age they can crack and fall apart. This prevents a good seal and can cause the refrigerator to work harder than it would with a good seal.

Around The Home

In looking for ways to reduce electric bills, the first thing most people think of is their thermostat. And they are right. Central heating and cooling accounts for more electric usage than any other appliance. But if you are going to practice conservation here, there is a right and wrong way to try and cut costs with heating and A/C. It is best not to turn your system off. Everything in your living spaces retain heat or cold and it will take extra energy to overcome this during the reheating or cooling process when you return. Instead, the U.S. Department of Energy recommends setting your thermostat to 78 when you are not at home.
In the summer months, try using fans to create a breeze rather than turning the A/C down. Just a few degrees higher can save a lot of energy.
This might seem obvious but we are all guilty of leaving room lights on when we leave the room. Be sure to turn off room lights, TVs and any other features or electronics if you are not coming right back.
Use power strips with switches in your computer area and for your entertainment center. Your entertainment center probably has a TV, a cable modem or box and a few other electronic devices. And your computer area most likely includes your PC, monitor(s), and a printer if not additional devices. These electronics all use power even when they are off. A power strip allows you to completely disconnect them. And a power strip / surge protector can provide additional protection for your electronics and computer equipment.
Set your computer and monitors to go into stand bye mode after 10 minutes instead of 30 minutes or never.
Replace incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs! If you replace the bulbs in the five most used light fixtures in your living spaces, you will save more than $65.00 a year. Imagine how much you could save if you only used compact fluorescent light bulbs for all your lighting.
Central heating and cooling has what is called a “Return Vent.” This intake vent is usually a large square vent in a central area of your apartment or condominium very near the inside unit where you change the air filters. Make sure this vent is not blocked with furniture. A blocked intake vent will dramatically reduce the cooling and heating efficiency of your central heating and cooling system.

If you would like to explore more ways to conserve water and electricity, and other topics such as how you bills are calculated, visit our Q&A page and take more control of your utility usage and costs.