Water Saving Tips

• Do use your dishwasher! Of course, wait for it to be full, but using your "light" cycle will use less water than letting water run and run as you wash and rinse dishes. For those of you who fill up the sink

 once and wash all the dishes in the same dirty water - you're spreading germs. Take advantage of your dishwasher's water savings and sanitary features.

• I used to have a beautiful, large expanse of lawn and bushes. After the drought claimed it all, I installed bricks and crushed rock with cactus plants. I no longer have a lawn to water out back. Seriously consider replacing some grass with brick or stones that can actually add beauty while decreasing maintenance and expenses.

• Keep in mind how little water your lawn actually needs. A beautiful lawn can be maintained with two short waterings each week, preferably at night when the sun isn't evaporating the water almost immediately.

• Yes, leaky faucets can be a nuisance, but in reality, a few drops of water isn't going to increase your water bill by anything you'll ever notice. It could cause other kinds of damage, however, which is where your real expenses will come in. To stop a few drops around the base of a faucet, if you don't want to fix or replace the entire mechanism, use a few drops of plumbers putty. Just make sure there are no overflow drips under the sink; this won't fix each and every problem.

• Laundry: the worst thing you can do here is over-stuffing your washer. If clothes don't have enough room to rotate in the water, they won't get clean. Trying to fit that last towel into an already stuffed load won't help at all. When you do this, you are actually wasting an entire load of water because your clothes won't even come out clean! You just wasted water, time and soap, and with this kind of continued laundering, you're damaging your clothes, too.