Tamara Harbar Going green
Last spring, the motor of my 21-year-old washer started smoking during a rinse cycle, so I pulled the plug, literally and figuratively. But my new front loading laundry machine baffled me. Where was the water? I heard it going in, but I couldn’t see it through the little round window.
One day, I just had to know how much water was – or wasn’t – washing my clothes. I paused the machine, opened the door and felt inside. The clothes were soaked, but there was barely enough of a puddle for a butterfly to drink from. My top-loading tub washer and the new front-loader are obviously exact opposites of each other. The old machine used huge amounts of water to wash a few clothes; the new machine uses hardly any water to wash lots of clothes.
How little water does it use? It cut our home’s total water consumption between 50 and 62 per cent, depending on the month, without any other changes in our water use. Front-loaders are estimated to use between 50 and 75 per cent less water than a top-loader, so we’re right in that range.
When I dug up our old bills, I was shocked at how much our water use has dropped, even though it doesn’t feel like much has changed. But over the last couple of years, we've installed a low-flow showerhead, low-flow toilet, faucet aerators, a rain barrel and finally the front-loading washing machine, and we’re now using only a quarter of the water we did before those changes.
Water conservation is just part of the story. Since front-loaders use less water, they also take less energy and less money to heat water for warm or hot washes. My Energy Star front-loader is estimated to devour only 145 kilowatt hours of electricity a year, or about 80 per cent less kilowatt hours than machines like my old top-loader.
Air drying is easier than ever, too, since the spin cycle leaves clothes feeling almost dry. I can put on a load of laundry in the middle of the afternoon, hang it out on the line and it will still dry by the end of the day. A friend of mine with a front-loader didn’t even bother buying an energy-gobbling dryer (even new dryers still consume over 900 kilowatt hours a year).
Before I knew it, I started wishing my old washer had konked out sooner.
Environmental Defence Canada (EDC) wishes all our old washers would konk out. Its recently published report, Down the Drain: Water Conservation in the Great Lakes Basin, says the switch to efficient washers would save 163 billion litres of water a year, or the same amount of water it would take to create 3.5 million NHL ice rinks. As the EDC report puts it, “Most Canadians use water like we breathe air; not thinking about it, just doing it.” But with population and water use on the rise, we’re taking water out of the Great Lakes faster than nature can replace it. That’s obviously not going to work out in the long run.
Fortunately, simple changes really do make a big difference. But I'm still surprised how such simple changes in our home—no expensive grey water systems, futuristic sonic showers or even major changes in lifestyle—made such a big difference.
Web Peek of the Week: See the colourful, well-prepared and interesting report yourself at www.environmentaldefence.ca/reports/pdf/DownTheDrain_Report.pdf.
