Conserving water

Further to the post on Thames Water (I was going to start a whole rant but cut it short - others have posted enough on that topic elsewhere) I got to thinking about my own water usage.

And it's not to bad for a First world Westener

For my morning ablutions:
While cleaning my teeth, I only run water to wash my mouth out and wash out the brush - it doesn't run for the 2+ mins I spend on my teeth
I have a shower not a bath and when applying shampoo or body wash I stop the shower - no point in running it if I'm not standing under it.
I normally dry shave
If making tea, I only pour enough in the kettle to fill the number of cups needed.
We don't have a dish washer so we wait until the sink is full before adding water (and Ecover dish wash :-))
The ironing also waits until we have a number of items
We use water from the tap for drinking and both drinking water and kettle water is filtered first (we'll be adding a limescale filter to the main water pipe soon)

I do buy the occasional bottle of mineral water to drink (I don't normally drink any kind of fizzy drinks) but I use either our tap water or the water from my workspace (we have our own supply and even sell some back to Thames Water!) to fill the bottle for several days.

The car rarely gets cleaned (or moved for that matter) and we have no garden (one of the joys of living in an apartment block)

There are still things we could improve on, I'm sure but it's a pretty good start

Water, water, everywhere ...

... except in the pipes of Thames Water apparently.

London, UK, has been under a drought order since spring. Thames Water have spent £1.5millon (about US$3mil) on an advertising campaign showing London landmarks flooded.

This post on Digital Irony shows one of them and a quick web hunt will find the others.

To put that budget in perspective - the combined total fine of their last four pollution incidents comes to less than £200,000 and their profits are in the hundreds of millions.

This company are spending more on making themselves look good than on actually fixing the problem - but it doesn't matter as the Government isn't doing an awful lot to reprimand them.