Saving money on utilities for renters (and owners) - Part 1 Water

Earth day was recently here and with that in mind I'd like to put in my two cents on how to save money for rents who may think it's a challenge.

Water
Water, next to oil, is one of the most important resources that's very difficult to renew. Yes there are desalination plants, water purifying systems, distilling plants and equipment, etc, but all of those require tremendous amounts of energy and money to clean large amounts of water. So we should be aware of this and try to conserve as much as possible. How did we do it here in our apartment? For our faucets we used an aerator as shown in the picture. This aerator is actually the one we use here, it has a flow rate of 0.5gpm (gallons per minute) which is considerably better than our old one which was 2.2gpm, a 77% reduction!  We still have clean hands and toothbrushes so don't worry!  We don't even notice it anymore.  It's really a great thing.  We use this in all of our faucets besides the kitchen one because we don't want to wait forever to fill up the pot with water.

Shower head is next on the list.  I love taking long showers so this was a huge saver for us.  And I can thank this shower head for saving us approximately 10950 gallons per year!  This guy will flow at a rate of 1.5 gpm compared to our old one which I think was 2.5 gpm.  So needless to say this saved us money right off the bat and we saw savings right away.
Perhaps you're worried about installing these items?  Installation is a cinch and completed in just a few minutes.

Our last water saving device that we currently have is the toilet "bank".  It's called the bank because it saves water in its pouch so that there is less to fill after you flush.  This can save up to 0.8 gallons per flush.

I wanted to install one other device into our toilet which would make it a dual flush, one for the liquids and one for the solids, however my partner in crime thought it was a bit much.  Coming from Europe, I was surprised by her reaction against it!  All of these things are under $35 and can be found on amazon's website.

The last few things that deal with water would be things like the dishwasher, laundry machine, etc.   Our solution to this is just to purchase things that are water saving and running the machine at optimal loads.

Energy
My next post will be about energy!