Living Greener

Green Advice ~ Toilet

Did you know you can reduce the amount of water used by a single flush toilet by only gently pressing the button to allow a little water down into the pan without doing a full flush?

Here are some simple tricks to reduce water used by your toilet.

If you have an older, dual flush toilet using 6 litres or 4.5 litres per flush, consider putting a 750 ml bottle full of water or a brick in it to reduce the water use.

Another trick for reducing how much water your toilet uses is to adjust the float position. By “tricking” the float you can have the toilet cistern think it is full even though it is only holding three quarters of the water it used to.

The best option for saving water in the toilet is to use a modern dual flush with a 3 and 4.5 litre capacity (a far cry from single flush toilets which dump 11 litres every time). If you have four people in your household, the saving, based on five flushes per person per day would be 156 litres a day, which is more than 55 kilolitres per annum (a saving of approximately $100).

To be fair, a new dual flush system will almost certainly need a new toilet cistern as well, so budget for a few hundred dollars to include plumber costs. But these can be significantly reduced by government rebates.