Seasonal Reminders
During the wintry months, you may have frozen pipes should you encounter having no water when you turn on your faucets. As the property owner, you are responsible for repairing your residence’s internal plumbing. To dodge costly repair bills due to frozen pipes, we recommend the following winterizing ideas:

1. Wrap and insulate pipes in unheated areas such as basements, closets, attics, or crawl spaces;
2. Caulk windows and replace or cover cracked or broken windows that are near water meters or pipes as well as where the pipe goes through walls; and
3. Locate and tag your master valve just in case pipe freeze and rapture.

A few simple cost effective steps will enhance your chances of a safe and comfortable winter season.

Save Water, Save Money
The average household spends as much as $500 per year on its water and sewer bill.  By making just a few simple changes to use water more efficiently, you could save about $170 per year.  If all U.S. households installed water-efficient appliances, the country would save more than 3 trillion gallons of water and more than $18 billion dollars per year!  Also, when we use water more efficiently, we reduce the need for costly water supply infrastructure investments and new wastewater treatment facilities.

Save Water, Save Energy
It takes a considerable amount of energy to deliver and treat the water you use every day.  American public water supply and treatment facilities consume about 56 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year—enough electricity to power more than 5 million homes for an entire year.  For example, letting your faucet run for five minutes uses about as much energy as letting a 60-watt light bulb run for 14 hours. By reducing household water use you can not only help reduce the energy required to supply and treat public water supplies but also can help address climate change.  In fact:

•  If one out of every 100 American homes retrofitted with water-efficient fixtures, we could save about 100 million kWh of electricity per year—avoiding 80,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions. That is equivalent to removing nearly 15,000 automobiles from the road for one year!        
• If 1 percent of American homes replaced their older, inefficient toilets with low consumption labeled models, the country would save more than 38 million kWh of electricity—enough to supply more than 43,000 households electricity for one month.

Why Save Water?

• Water is a finite resource—even though about 70 percent of the Earth's surface is covered by water, less than 1 percent is available for human use.
• At least 36 states are projecting water shortages between now and 2013.
• Each American uses an average of 100 gallons of water a day at home.
• We can all use 30 percent less water by installing water-efficient fixtures and appliances.
• The average household spends as much as $500 per year on their water and sewer bill and can save about $170 per year by installing water-efficient fixtures and appliances.

Facts and Statistics

• Approximately 5 to 10 percent of American homes have water leaks that drip away 90 gallons a day or more!  Many of these leaks reside in old fixtures such as leaky toilets and faucets.  In fact, water lost by these leaky fixtures could be reduced by more than 30,000 gallons if new, efficient fixtures were installed.  If the 5 percent of American homes that leak the most corrected those leaks—it could save more than 177 billion gallons of water annually!
• Using low consumption faucets or faucet accessories could reduce a household's faucet water use by more than 500 gallons annually—that's enough water to do 14 loads of laundry.
• If one in every 10 homes in the United States were to install low consumption faucets or faucet accessories in their bathrooms, it could save 6 billion gallons of water, and more than $50 million in the energy costs to supply, heat, and treat that water.
• If all inefficient toilets in U.S. homes were converted to low consumption models, we could save more than 640 billion gallons of water per year—the equivalent to 15 days of flow over Niagara Falls.
• If homeowners with irrigation systems use water conservation when watering, they could reduce irrigation water by 15 percent or about 9,000 gallons annually—or the amount of water that would flow from a garden hose nonstop for nearly a whole day.