Green Plumbing: How Sydney Homes are Becoming More Environmentally Friendly

In Sydney alone, almost one and a half million litres of water is used every day. Water’s truly the world’s most precious resource, and by making sure you’ve got green plumbing, you can help reduce the amount of water used each day. But how do you make your plumbing green and environmentally friendly?

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There’s a huge range of things that you can do if you want to make your plumbing green, depending on whether you want to go in for a big job or would rather something a little smaller and less costly.

Bigger jobs include things like:

• Insulating your pipes so that when you use hot water, it loses less heat as it travels. This means that you can cut the standby energy water loss from your hot water heater, as well as reducing your energy bills.
• Moving pipes from outside to inside is similar to insulating pipes. By having pipes in conditioned spaces, like inside your walls, you reduce the amount of heat lost due to being exposed to the cold weather outside.
• Getting an on-demand hot water circulation pump means that hot water isn’t lost by being left to sit in pipes after you turn the tap off. Also the hot water that comes out of your tap will be instantaneous, saving you from wasting water as you wait for the water to heat up before hopping in the shower or filling the sink for the dishes.

Smaller jobs can be as simple as:

• Putting chlorine filters on your showerheads to reduce the amount of chlorine that you wash in, and therefore send back down the drain.
• To potentially reduce your water usage by an astounding 60%, you can install low-flow shower heads and taps. This means that the amount of water coming out of your tap or shower head per second is reduced.
• To match your low-flow shower heads and taps, you can also get a low-flush toilet which works in a similar way to these low-flow devices.