Water-Saving Plumbing Fixtures to Install in Your Home

If you’d like to conserve water to save a precious, expendable resource and lower your household utility bills at the same time, installing water-saving plumbing fixtures can help you reduce your overall consumption. Here are some efficient fixtures worth considering:

Water-Saving Faucets

If you still have conventional faucets in your home, you’re not only using too much water, you’re wasting energy each time you turn on a hot water tap. To put the potential waste into perspective, running hot water through a conventional faucet for just five minutes uses as much energy as leaving a 60-watt light bulb burning for 14 hours. Low-flow faucets can curb this unnecessary consumption by to 30 percent, and they’re available with flow ratings ranging from 0.8–1.5 gallons per minute (gpm).

High-Efficiency Toilets

There are over 60 different toilets on the market that are certified as high-efficiency through the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) WaterSense program. The latest innovations in ultra-efficient toilets include pressure-assisted versions with small pumps or storage tanks, gravity-fed, single-flush models, and dual-flush toilets that give you the option of using either 0.8 and 1.6 gallons per flush. The most efficient toilets available can curb water consumption by 20 percent compared to 1.6 gallon models, and they use up to 5,000 gallons per year less than a standard model.

Low-Flow Shower Heads

The flow from standard shower heads is typically 2.5 gallons a minute, while EPA-certified low-flow versions pump out less than 2.0 gpm but still provide an invigorating shower. Savings of just a half gallon a minute may not seem like enough to make replacing your existing shower heads worthwhile, but it can add up to approximately 2,800 gallons a year in the average household. That translates into significantly lower water bills, and energy savings of about 370 kilowatt hours (kWh) if you have an electric water heater.

At Sobieski Services, Inc., our goal is to help our customers in Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland and New Jersey learn more about energy and home comfort issues — especially HVAC and plumbing issues — so that they can save money and live in healthier, more comfortable homes.