Brushing Your Teeth - another opportunity to save water

When you're brushing your teeth, you can save water by simply thinking about what you're doing and the needless waste that is normally associated with this activity.

Maybe I'm wrong, but doesn't the average person simply let the water run while they brush their teeth? Isn't that how we fooled our mother into thinking we were brushing our teeth when we were a kid? Sure it was, because we knew our culture well enough to figure out that most of us simply run water continuously while brushing our teeth.

Out mothers listened for running water, not the sound of teeth being brushed.



Okay, we're not going to save a lot of water with whatever advice I have to offer here, but again, it's a frugal mindset. If we save a little at a time, our savings grows. And, our mindset of conservation will migrate into other activities we're engaged in, and that will lead to savings there as well.

So, you know what I'm going to suggest when brushing your teeth - shut off the water. That means shut off the water while brushing your teeth because running water isn't necessary to support the task immediately at hand. It's a common sense approach that is easy to implement; use the water to wet your brush, rinse your brush, and rinse out the sink. It's simple and easy to implement.

Of course, like a conservative approach to washing the dishes, this requires that we trouble ourselves to turn off the water. We'll also have to suffer the hardship of missing that fascinating view of water swirling about and running down the drain, but like they say, everything has its price.

A friend of mine in Texas said something to me one day that really caught my attention. He said that there will likely come a day when we'll regret all the water we've wasted while washing our hands, brushing our teeth, or doing the dishes, and then we'll look back and long for the days when we enjoyed the luxury of simply running water down the drain.

Whether you have well water or a municipal water supply, you're paying for the water you use, and the municipal sewer charges as well, so if you hope to minimize your bills, you need to minimize your water use as well. That doesn't mean to stop using water, it simply means stop wasting it.

Brushing your teeth in a more conservative manner with respect to using water is a simple and small step to help you save money, but it's something that's well within our grasp. It may be tiny fruit, but it's low hanging, so we really ought to grab it.

Done with Brushing Your Teeth, take me back to Save Water