Prepaing for El Nino: Sand Bottles for Flush Toilet

Our electricity consumption is a lot lower than most people I know who have similar type and number of electric appliance. I attribute that to the my refusal to have an aircon installed in our house. 

Ok, before you admire my tenacity (or 'kakuriputan' however you want to call it), it's because we don't really need an aircon. We live in Tagaytay and even summers here are tolerable -- you only need a fan to cool you down.

However, the same cannot be said of our water bill. Our monthly water bill always hits the P1,000 mark with only 4 adults and 2 kids in the house. Ok, I admit, we have a huge vegetable garden that is way more than the average backyard garden of those living in the city and we use clean water to water those plants. 

To help bring down our water consumption (Fine! it's more of the environmentalist in me!), I thought of installing a DIY rainwater collection system in our backyard like this one below. Depending on the set-up, you can save as much water as you can which you can use to flush the toilet or water the plants (not advisable for washing the plates or taking a bath though *wink*).

Barrel Rainwater Collection System (photo from the web)

I am still waiting for the tote bins or blue plastic barrels from a friend who quoted me at way lower than the market price so I will update you on that one once it's finally installed.

Meanwhile, I read in the internet that flushing the toilet is one of the culprits of high water consumption and is, of course, not very environment-friendly! Did you know that one toilet flush can consume up to 7 gallons of water per flush? (Whaaaat?!!)

My hubby works in Africa and he always tells me stories of how the people there take a bath only once a week due to lack of water supply. Most do not even have access to clean, potable water. And here we are, using CLEAN & POTABLE water just to flush the damn toilet?! That sickens me!

To save on water in flush toilet, I taught my two kids not to flush as often as they pee. Yep, you heard me right! I read this in the internet, or something like this:

'If it's yellow, let it mellow.
If it's brown, sink it down.'

However, they always forget! It has been my kids' habit to flush the toilet every after use.

And so while I'm waiting for our tote bins and to counter that annoying water-wasting-flushing, I put these sand bottles inside the water tank of every flush toilet in our house to minimize the amount of water being flushed per flush (stay with me!).

Initially, I put only one bottle but after seeing the tank has still room for more, I added one more sand-filled bottle.

We'll see after a month if it will help me bring down that water bill! Watch out for it.