Judging by recent events, it doesn’t seem that South African residents will be free from water restrictions any time soon. Instead of fighting against them and resenting Mother Nature, we should be embracing them with open arms in an attempt to be more water savvy and preserve what we have left of this precious, life-giving resource. Here are the Letsolo team’s top tips for saving water during water restrictions.

Watering Plants

Watering plants with a hosepipe is a big no-no at this stage. In order to stop plants from wilting, we recommend using a bucket to catch precious drops while waiting for the shower water to heat up, and then using that in the garden. Also be sure to avoid watering the garden in any way 48 hours after there has been rainfall. In this instance, you can use your collected shower water for other things like cooking or washing dishes.

Check Your Showerhead

We don’t need copious amounts of water to cleanse our bodies. Make sure that you stay within the restrictions by checking to see if your showerhead flow rate exceeds 10 litres per minute. There are numerous products out there that can help you to reduce this flow rate, and most of them are quite affordable indeed.

Save Your Cooking Water

You can still use water in which potatoes, pasta or veggies have been boiled. Not only can you reuse it for further cooking, it can also be repurposed to water plants in the garden. The small amounts of salt added to it during cooking won’t cause any harm, and the remaining nutrients will do your plants a world of good!

Choose to Hand Wash

This goes for clothes and dishes. It’s worth the extra effort as you can save litres of water this way – and the remaining water can also be reused.

Ultimately, water restrictions don’t have to be daunting. It’s quite easy to adhere to them as long as you remain conscious of your water usage. Most importantly, don’t think for one second that the efforts that you are making to conserve water are in vain. Literally every drop counts.