A recent Facebook exchange between two American women caught my attention. “Run your clean towels through the washer once with baking soda, then again once again with vinegar,” they advised enthusiastically. “Voila! Fluffy, soft towels like new!” While baking soda and vinegar are excellent biodegradable cleaners, the water waste involved in that procedure makes one cringe. After all, hard towels are hardly a hardship. Not having enough clean water is.With summer temperatures rising uncomfortably, the temptation to splurge on water begins to feel like a right. But that’s a mistake. Israel enjoyed a spectacular amount of rainfall last winter, but we’re in no way free from caring for our most precious natural resource.Tightwads are famously willing to put up with a certain amount of discomfort to keep a grip on their money. In this time of climate change, a hotter Earth and attendant droughts, we should be thinking the same way – “stingy” – when we think of using water.Here are some strategies: Exploit free water from your air conditioner.Runoff water collected from your air conditioner is distilled water and a great resource. One day’s accumulation will fill a 19-liter bucket, and maybe another, depending on how many hours your air conditioner has run and how many units are cooling your house. Let the hose trickle into a clean bucket, and you’ll have more water for household chores than you’ll know what to do with.Some uses: Fill your steam iron with airconditioning runoff. It’s free distilled water, and your iron won’t get clogged with mineral deposits from it. I take a large, empty plastic jug and let the air conditioner hose drip into it until it’s full.Wash your floors with it. If you wash your tiled floors Israeli-style, with a squeegee mop, floor cloth and bucket, one day’s accumulation of airconditioning runoff should give you enough water to soap and rinse the floors.Water your plants with it.Wash your car with it.Wilting under our clothes in summer heat, we long to slip into the shower and get a little cool relief. Basic hygiene dictates one shower a day, but what happens when it’s evening and you want to freshen up with another one before going to bed? Don’t waste our ground or lake water: Empty half a bucket of water from the air conditioning runoff over your head in the shower. Soap up, then rinse with the other half bucket.Primitive? Yes, and a shlep to move the water into the bathroom. But you’re cooling off without using up ground or lake water. If the water has accumulated in a clean bucket, it will be at least as clean as the chlorinated swimming pool you’re used to, or even Lake Kinneret itself.Distilled water is not safe for drinking.Save water in the bathroom.Shower timers are alarms that stick to the shower tiles and go off at the end of the time you set. They are available online, but cheaper and easier to find are simple kitchen timers that ping.Keep one on a bathroom shelf and set it for five minutes just before entering the shower. You’ll get used to five-minute showers very quickly with the timer.Keep a bucket in the bathroom for catching the first blast of cold water.When the bucket fills up, use the water for flushing the toilet. Or use this water for scrubbing the tub, sink and toilet at cleanup times.Turn the shower off between soaping up and rinsing. Gallons of clean water go down the drain because it’s a little inconvenient to stop the flow while you’re busy soaping.If you don’t have a low-pressure shower head already installed, stop at your nearest hardware store and pick one up. We all love to shower with lots of water pressure, but it’s not necessary for hygiene and it’s wasteful.Save water when you brush your teeth.Moisten the toothpaste if you like, then turn the tap off before you actually start brushing. Turn the tap on and off as needed when you rinse. This sounds like a big pain in the neck, but it becomes automatic over time.In the same way, any time you wash your hands, turn the water flow off while soaping them.Modern Israeli toilets come with larger and smaller flush buttons, but older models may not have this feature. If yours doesn’t, clean the label off a two-liter soda bottle and fill it about a quarter of the way up with sand, gravel or pebbles.The ballast is necessary to keep it in place when you put it in the toilet tank; if filled only with water, it will move around.Finish filling the bottle with water, cap it tightly, and place in the toilet tank.This simple device will save half a gallon of water every time the toilet flushes.Assuming that every individual flushes five times daily, a couple with three children can save 1,325 liters of water every month.Save water in the laundry.Make sure the washer is full before turning a load on.Press the half-load button if it’s necessary to wash only half a load. This won’t economize on electricity, only water and detergent.Use bath towels two or three times before laundering. Your bath towels wipe down clean bodies – there’s no need to throw them in the hamper after one use.Save water in the kitchen.The debate continues as to whether a dishwasher is more water-economical than washing dishes by hand. Varying factors such as efficiency of the person doing the washing and the age and condition of a given dishwasher make the calculation difficult, but it does seem that a modern dishwasher actually uses less water. There are other ecological considerations in the picture, such as energy use, and the use of detergents that aren’t biodegradable.At the kitchen sink, apply soap to a wet sponge. Turn water off and scrub, then turn water back on to rinse. Use low pressure to rinse. It’s faster washing with the faucets on full blast, but it’s wasteful.Wash in this order: glassware first, then dishes, cutlery third, and pots last.Washing kitchenware in sets, using the same motions for each kind of object, uses less water and, as a bonus, makes organizing the drying easier.Water left over in the kettle from the day before? Use it to rinse a dish or two, or to water a houseplant.Don’t use running water to wash leafy greens. Rinse them in a bowl full of water, swishing them back and forth to loosen dirt. Dump the water into a bucket for another use such as watering plants.Wash the greens again in a second bowl; this cleaner water may be used to rinse a couple of dishes.If you drink water all day long, set one glass aside for your private use and keep refilling it. Unless you’re sick, there’s no need to use a freshly washed glass every time.Make ice cubes out of leftover tea and coffee. Yum! And you’ll have saved water to make ice.The water-saving principle is always the same, no matter what (or who) you’re washing: get the object wet, then turn the water off. Scrub, then turn the faucet back on to rinse.
