Property water saving tips

Outside

If you wash your car once a fortnight and leave the hose running throughout, you'd use 1,000 litres of water per hour. That's 13,000 litres per year.

Use your broom to sweep your driveway.
Limit the use of your hose to a quick spray at the beginning, to loosen the dirt and grime, and at the end to rinse off the soapy water.
Don't wash your car on the berm near a stormwater drain; wash it on the garden lawn and water the grass at the same time.
Protect living streams by not washing paints, solvents, oil or chemicals down storm drains. Water from these drains does not go to the sewerage treatment plant, it goes into the same waterways we fish and swim in. Drains are only for rain!

In the home

Check inside taps for leaks. Even a tap with a small drip can waste a lot of water.
Use a bucket of water to clean things; then do the rinsing quickly with your hose.

Bathroom

If you brush your teeth twice a day for 3 minutes and leave the tap running while you're brushing, you'd use around 5 litres per minute. That's 10,950 litres per year.

Follow these top tips to conserve water in the bathroom:

Use a glass of water to rinse your mouth after brushing your teeth. This could save 9,100 litres per year.
Shorter showers. Save water by limiting your shower to the time it takes to soap up, wash down and rinse off.
Does your existing shower head supply over 12 litres of water per minute? Collect the flow in a bucket for 30 seconds, find out how much using a kitchen measuring jug, then double to calculate the flow in one minute. It could be as high as 20 litres a minute! If so, you could save a lot of water by using a low flow head that supplies about 7 litres per minute, at the same pressure as before. The new one must match the screw-thread of the shower head you take off and be suitable for the low or high water pressure available in your house. You could save over 20,000 litres per year.
Check if your toilet is leaking by putting a little food colouring in the cistern. If the colouring begins appearing in the bowl even without flushing, get the cistern repaired immediately.
Replacing your single flush toilet with a 6/3 dual flush toilet can save up to 5 litres of water per full flush. In a home of 2 adults and 2 children, that can amount to a saving of 36,180 litres per year.

Kitchen and laundry

A running tap uses up to 29 litres of water each minute, so it's important to be mindful of how much water you're using when turning the tap on.

Wash fruit and veggies in the sink half filled with water, rather than running it over them.
Keep a jug of water in the fridge, then you won't have to run the tap for a cold glass of water.
Rather than running the tap over frozen food to defrost, plan ahead and put frozen foods on a plate in the fridge at about 4 degrees for a few hours to thaw (the higher end of an average fridge temperature of 0 to 4 degrees). Their initial chill also helps to keep the fridge cool, which is also more energy efficient.
Don't rinse dishes before loading them into your dishwasher. Use the 'rinse & hold' setting instead.
Ensure you have a full load when using your washing machine. You can use around 120 litres of water per wash, so if you have a less than full wash, adjust the water level to suit your wash load.
When buying a new washing machine, choose one that is water efficient. You could save a substantial amount of water, as well as money, over the life of the machine.