Enderby water is precious. Be water wise – help conserve water! Give our environment a helping hand and save a little money while you are at it.
When you save water, you help contribute to these good things:
Improve conservation – changing your habits now will help keep the community’s water demand within the limits of our available sources and drinking water production capacity.
Defer capital costs – by using less water, the City can defer expensive upgrades to its water and wastewater facilities, which will enable these costs to be spread among a broader tax base (lessening the burden to each individual user), build its capital reserves (lessening the need to increase taxes), and apply for senior government grants (to offset tax increases).
Lower operating costs – the operating costs of the utility are billed back to the customer through the user fee. Reducing your consumption will reduce variable expenses, such as energy costs associated with pumping water.
When you save water, everybody wins!
How to Save Water
Just follow the 3 R’s to save water (click to expand):
Reduce
Reducing your water use is as simple as turning off the tap while brushing your teeth, taking shorter showers, or operating dishwashers and washing machines with full loads.
DON’T leave the tap running when you’re brushing your teeth.
DO use a bucket and a hose with a shut-off nozzle to wash your car. This can save about 300 litres of water.
DON’T use the toilet as a wastebasket or flush it unnecessarily.
DO take short showers – five minutes or less should do.
DON’T water your lawn in the hot sun or on a windy day. Remember to always water in accordance with the City’s watering restrictions!
DO keep a bottle or decanter of drinking water in the refrigerator rather than running your tap to get cold water when you want a drink.
DON’T mow your lawn until your grass has reached a height of 2.25 inches.
Repair
Fix leaks as soon as you find them. Leaky fixtures can be costly to both you and the environment over the long-term. Drop by City Hall to pick up free dye tablets to test whether your toilet has a leak!
Leaks can be costly. A leak of only one drop per second wastes about 10,000 litres of water per year.
Leaking faucets are often caused by a worn out washer that costs pennies to replace. Most hardware stores will have faucet repair kits with illustrations showing how to replace a washer.
A toilet that continues to run after flushing can waste up to 200,000 litres of water in a single year! To find out if your toilet is leaking, drop by City Hall to pick up free dye tablets. Drop the tablets in the tank at the back of your toilet. Wait a few minutes. If the dye shows up in the bowl, there’s a leak.
Toilet leaks are often due to a flush valve or flapper valve that isn’t sitting properly in the valve seat, bent or misaligned flush valve lift wires, or a corroded valve seat. All of these can be fixed easily and inexpensively.
Retrofit
Install faucet aerators, replace an old showerhead with a low-flow model, or replace an old toilet with an ultra-low flush model. Water used in the bathroom can be reduced by up to 50%.
Toilets – You can install a water-saving device inside the tank or, if the toilet is more than fifteen years old – which means it probably uses about 18 litres of water or more per flush – you can replace it with an ultra-low-volume toilet.
Showers and Faucets – Conventional showerheads have flow rates up to 15 to 20 litres per minute. A properly designed low-flow showerhead can reduce that flow by half and still provide proper shower performance. Conventional faucets have an average flow rate of 13.5 litres of water per minute. Low-flow aerators will reduce this flow. In the bathroom, a flow rate of about 6 litres per minute should be sufficient, and in the kitchen a flow rate of 6-9 litres per minute is sufficient.
Lawns – Sprinklers should be suited to the size and shape of the lawn to avoid watering driveways and sidewalks. Sprinklers that lay water down in a flat pattern are better than oscillating sprinklers which lose as much as 50% of what they disperse through evaporation. If you have underground irrigation, this can often be a source of leaks.
Enderby Water Meter Program
Water meters promote conservation which saves money for all of us by delaying infrastructure expansion. Water meters also allow for more equitable billing so customers using more water pay more while customers using less water pay less.
Bills are sent three times per year. The bill will also include sewer and garbage user fees.
Did you know that the most common sources of leaks are underground irrigation, toilets, and faucets? Locating and fixing all leaks will save you water and money.
Your water meter can do a lot more than just measure your water use for the purposes of billing. It is a tool that you can use to monitor your own consumption and identify leaks. Just wave a flashlight over the face of your meter register (be sure to aim it at the small flashlight symbol) and a digital display will appear. Here is the information that you can get from the digital display:
Did you know that a steady drip from a leaky faucet can waste up to 55 litres of drinking water in 24 hours, a constant dribble can waste up to 220 litres in 24 hours, and a steady stream can waste up to 880 litres in 24 hours?
