It has been a week since Governor Jerry Brown asked for a 20% reduction in personal water usage.
What are people doing in California to save water?
I was in college the during the last drought. It marked me forever. We only flushed for number 2, ever. We put bricks (or something) in our toilette tanks to take them down from the then prevalent 5-7.5 gallons per flush. Today we have dual flush toilettes, mine have 4.5/3 liter flushes, but I still only flush during day light hours. One saved the cold water (for gardening) that was spent waiting for hot water to get to the faucet. Today I have a recirculating pump for my on demand hot water heater. Short, interrupted showers and toothbrushing by hand with no running water are still the norm. As I say, I am a marked woman. OK, I have raced to Hawaii and some of these habits have been reinforced.
We hand washed our dishes, and air dried them. My dishwasher (which I only run full) takes 5 gallons, which I think is about equal to hand washing. And I can go back to air drying. I can go back to only running the garbage disposal once a day while I am scrubbing vegetables.
Clothing was washed (sometimes by hand) and air dried, but I am not sure I can go back to hand washing. I can try to wash each piece less frequently - we used to call this cleaning by 'fiat': you declared your clothing to be clean through multiple wearings until it was truly obvious to the most near sighted that the emperor had no clean clothing.
Watering the garden was a "SEP" field (someone else's problem) in college as I was renting. Today - well the 10 square feet of grass can be cobbled, but I still want to water my tomatoes - Black Krims. I don't know how much water I can save outside.
About 14% of California's energy comes from hydro electric dams. In another diary I'll take a look at electricity, and how to save that.
In the meantime - I would like to know what everyone else is doing.