Info and tips: Save water

Washing vegetables or fruit or quickly rinsing a slightly dirty plate. And just like that, one or two liters of precious tap water have disappeared down the drain. You can use a bowl to collect the water and water the flowers. Plants are also happy about the (cooled) cooking water from boiling eggs or potatoes.
With 2 liters of water per day, you can collect 730 liters of water per year. In the city of Offenbach, with a population of around 140,000, this would add up to an impressive 102.2 million liters of water.

36 percent of the drinking water used in households is used for personal hygiene (bathing and showering) (source: Federal Environment Agency). Depending on the size of the bathtub, around 140 liters of water are needed for a full bath. Showering uses only half as much water. However, if you shower continuously for more than 12 minutes, you will quickly use the same amount as a full bath.
So how much do you pay for a hot shower?
That depends on various factors, such as the water temperature, the amount of water that flows through the shower head, how long you shower for, the cost of the waste water and the energy source used to heat the water.

You can easily calculate the amount of water that flows through the shower head yourself. Place a 10-liter bucket in the shower and use a stopwatch to calculate the time it takes for the bucket to fill up. If it takes 50 seconds, the shower head has a water flow rate of 12 liters per minute:

600:50 = 12 liters per minute
A water flow rate of 12 liters per minute is quite high - an economy shower head can help here.

If you now multiply the water flow rate by the shower duration, you get the water consumption for each shower:

12 liters per minute x 12 minutes = 144 liters

If you only shower for 8 minutes, you use 48 liters less per shower.

A fictitious calculation example:

With a shower water flow rate of 10 liters per minute, a daily shower duration of 12 minutes at 38 degrees Celsius and a water price of 2.46 euros per cubic meter, you pay around 180 euros per year for district heating (plus the energy costs, of course).
If you shorten the shower time by 2 minutes, you save around 30 euros a year. If you reduce the shower duration by 2 minutes and the shower water flow to 8 liters, you save around 60 euros a year.

To summarize: Turn off the shower when soaping up, fit a shower head or simply take a shorter shower - this will save you a lot of money at the end of the year.

A dripping tap is not only annoying, it also increases water costs. If one drop falls out of the tap every second, after five and a half hours a liter of water has splashed but disappeared unused down the drain. Over the course of a year, this results in a calculated cost of 1,580 liters of water.

Dishwashers are more economical than manual dishwashers: up to 50 liters of water are needed to wash twelve place settings by hand. To heat the water, 2.5 kWh of electricity is needed when washing dishes by hand. For the same amount of dishes, however, a dishwasher only needs an average of around 19 liters of water and just 1.4 kWh of electricity. A dishwasher can save up to 31 liters of precious drinking water and 1.1 kWh of electricity. It goes without saying that the dishwasher should only be started fully loaded in order to make optimum use of water and detergent. Pre-rinsing the dishes under running water is not necessary and is therefore a waste.

It doesn't always have to be a full wash: Germans wash their cars an estimated 900 million times a year. In addition to cleaning agents, around 200 liters of water are needed per wash to remove oil, grease, tar, soot and heavy metal dust. It is often enough to clean the windows and lights. To ensure that no pollutants are released into the environment, cars should only be cleaned at car washes and car washes. There, the waste water is cleaned and a large proportion of the water is recirculated. Particularly water-friendly car washes can be recognized by the "Blue Angel".

Temperatures well above 30 degrees are no longer a rarity in the summer months. Garden and balcony owners look at their vegetable plants and flowers with concern. The rain barrels have been empty for weeks, leaving only tap water to water the plants. The first districts have already banned this this year. Mulching, i.e. covering the soil with organic material, can help somewhat. Lawn cuttings are very suitable for this. This prevents the soil from drying out so quickly in the summer months and provides it with nutrients.