Rain Water Tank Level Monitor

You do have a water tank installed at your home don’t you?  Well if you don’t, get one, then get this nifty little wireless remote water level monitor from Rain Harvest.

The water sensor sits a-top your tank and uses ultrasonic radio waves, kind if like a fish finder I guess, to see how much water’s in your tank.  It transmits a signal back to the receiver plugged in to a power-point in the home to give you a water level reading.

Save water with biodegradable water retaining foam

Fytogreen produce biodegradable water saving foam products for use in pot plants and garden beds. These foam products improve water retention in your soil, decreasing the amount of water you use and frequency of watering. Check out the Fytogreen website for product details.

Shower Buckets

A more convenient bucket for collecting your shower water or for bucketing out the kids bath water is this collapsible bucket from Ripple Products. It collapses to conveniently store in the bathroom.

Instead of scooping up the water with a conventional bucket, the Ripple bucket is able to be fully submerged.  No more trips out to the garden with a half empty bucket!

Grey water for Gardens

The H₂grO Greywater for Gardens irrigation system allows you to use your water twice.

Greywater from the shower or laundry is sent to the garden via the diverter and irrigation pods. Check out the website for details.

Recirculated Shower System

According to their website, The Quench shower system can save you massive amounts of water at home by recycling your shower water while you shower.  You can have nice long hot showers without the guilt and only use 4 litres of water. Visit the Quench website for details.

Save water, use less electricity

An interesting article in The Age detailing the massive amounts of water used to create electricity. Check out the article - Save precious water at the flick of a switch.

Waterless Car Wash

So Brilliant Waterless Car Wash is biodegradable, anti-bacterial, anti-fungal, non-toxic, silicone free and 100% environmentally safe. It’s a spray on water-less application that you gently rub in and wipe off. Check out the So Brilliant website for details.

Drought Tolerant Plants

Melbourne Water has a great Water Wise Plants page on their conserve water website to help you find trees, shrubs, and ground cover plants  that are drought tolerant.   You can search for the 25 or 50 most drought tolerant plants and sort by plant type.  A great little resource to help the water wise gardener.

Save Paper and water - Get a fax to email service

Producing paper takes a LOT of water. Using my very simple maths, based on figures from Friends of The Earth, it takes at least 250 litres of water to produce a ream or 500 sheets of A4 paper.

Generally, we don’t use a lot of paper in our office, however, the old fax machine used to receive plenty of fax SMAP. You know the faxes you get offering 7 nights in Thailand for a ridiculously low price or inkjet cartridge replacement offers etc. It used to frustrate me the amount of paper these SPAM faxes would waste – much like junk mail I suppose. But recently we’ve put an end to all the paper waste created by needless faxes. We’ve started using a virtual fax service.

Signing up for a virtual fax service gives you a phone number your clients can send normal faxes to. The Virtual Fax Service then converts the faxed document to an electronic format, such as PDF, and forwards it to your email address. This means you can delete non-print worthy faxes just like you’d delete spam. No wasted paper or ink.

Need to send a fax? No problem. Just email the PDF, MS Word or Excel document to an your Virtual Fax Service provider with the recipients phone number and you’re done. No printing and no wastage due to unsolicited faxes.

There are plenty of providers to choose from. Here are a couple of Australian virtual fax services to choose from:

• Utbox
• eFax
• Faxem

Move one step closer to the paperless office and use less water, get a virtual fax service.