Feeling flush

It's hard to keep the momentum going on this ever reducing emissions efficiency drive. One of the problems is that the 'real world' seems to interfere. You know that world where you have to go to work and get the kids to school and do the weekly shop and pay the bills and tidy the house and before you know it the week is over and you haven't given a passing thought to reducing your emissions or saving the planet. Well I guess most people have weeks like that; some poor souls probably have lives like that.

Anyway that was last week, the week in which the only thing I managed to do to move our family eco project on was to make the now weekly note of our gas and electricity consumption. Oh and try and draw a graph of our emerging consumption pattern. I know it's pretty early to see any kind of trend but I was at least hoping that the controversial introduction of a few energy efficient lightbulbs might have made the tiniest of dents in our figures or shown up on my graph. But sadly not. In fact the only trend my graph shows so far is a pattern of pretty much unvarying consumption, a horizontal line creeping slowly across the page week by week. If my little graph were on a heart rate monitor, the prognosis would be extremely bleak.

But I still believe we are alive and able to change things. We just need to get around to it, make time for it, make it a priority. And this is a new week, so what better time to start. Except that it is half term and the kids are demanding a lot of attention.

Still, my eldest boy moved things on today when he came across a little green book on my desk. "What is The Little Book of Living Green?" he asked picking it up and thumbing through it. "Is it to help save the planet?" he continued without pausing for my response. He knows how to make a father feel guilty. He stopped at the page about waterhogs and read it to me out loud, a feat which in itself amazed me as he has only just learnt to read. But it was when he finished he impressed me most. "That sounds a good idea," he said, "shall we get one?" How could I refuse such a call to action?

It took no more than five minutes to look up our water supplier on the internet, find out about their free 'Save a Flush' offer and order the three waterhogs we need to make our toilets a little more efficient. Apparently flushing toilets accounts for about 35% of household water usage; toilets fitted pre-2000 use somewhere between 7.5 and 9 litres per flush and a Save a Flush or waterhog (a device you fit in your cistern to reduce the amount of water it holds) can help reduce this to closer to 6 litres, as is the 21st century way. Now if you have five people in a house and they go a modest four times a day each, then a Save a Flush which saves a litre a time will could save as much as 20 litres of water per day, assuming they remember to flush. Load 10 large bottles of mineral water into your shopping trolley next time you're at the supermarket and you'll appreciate that's a lot of water to flush away, especially in these times of drought.

I must say I'm quite looking forward to the arrival of our waterhogs. But it's not so much the prospect of saving the water that I'm anticipating (although that's got to be a good thing) but I'm looking forward to the smile on my boy's face when the parcel arrives addressed to him and the simple pleasure of doing a little something together to reduce our family footprint.