Leaks – Find them and stop them
The first step to water conservation in the home is to check for leaks. Dripping taps and leaking toilets can account for as much as five percent of all water used inside the home. Leaks are not only wasteful but also expensive, particularly if it is hot water that is leaking. The water replacing the leaking hot water needs to be heated and this of course is using up a lot of electricity in your home. Fortunately most leaks are relatively easy and inexpensive to repair.
To find leaks is not as difficult as people may think.
To start of with you should check all the immediately obvious places for leaks these would be things like dripping taps, water trickling into your toilet bowl or dripping overflow pipes. The toilet is on of the biggest source of leaks in the home. If you hear water trickling into the bowl lo9ng after you have flushed the toilet, it’s leaking. Some toilet leaks are more difficult to detect because the trickle into the toilet bowl is silent. Did you know that a leaking toilet can wast up to 100 000 liters of water in one year? This would be enough water to take three full baths.
When you have fixed all the visible leaks, you need to be certain that you don’t have any hidden water leaks such as those in underground pipes. In order to detect this leak you should find your water meter and read it twice a day. Take your first reading at night this is once the daily water use has ended and then take a second reading in the morning. All of this must be done ensuring that not water is used by anyone in the house between the night and day readings. If the figures differ then you probably have discovered a leak. A quick calculation by subtracting the one figure from the other will tell you how much water has leaked out.
Lets not forget our swimming pools as this is another possible area of undetected leakage either through a crack in the pool or from the pipework.
All of these could help towards us reducing the water consumption in our homes often people
may not think they have leaks and water is wasted this way costing everyone a lot of money.
