How do I cut my water and energy bills without buying anything?

Start with the leak nobody can hear, because it is the only one on this page that costs you money while you sleep. Then the bucket, the contract, and the sun.

Find the silent leak with food colouring. Find the silent leak with food coloring is ten minutes and no tools: put a few drops of food colouring in the toilet tank, wait ten minutes, and look in the bowl. Colour in the bowl with nobody flushing means the toilet is leaking. The ten minutes are the EPA’s figure from its water-efficiency guidance, and checking too early lets a real leak pass. What is happening is a rubber flapper at the bottom of the tank that has warped or hardened and stopped sitting flat, so water slides under it in a stream too thin to see against white porcelain; the tank drops, the fill valve tops it up, and that is the refill sound you stopped hearing in the second week. The EPA’s phrasing for the cost is thousands of gallons a year. The part worth knowing before you buy anything: the tablets and gels that sit in the tank and turn the water blue are hard on everything rubber in there, and that is not rumour, it is written into the warranties, one manufacturer saying outright it does not cover damage from in-tank cleaners because they can seriously corrode the fittings. Nothing goes in the tank; everything the tank needs is done from the bowl side. Two words make buying the right part possible: the fill valve brings water in, the flush valve is the opening at the bottom, and the flapper is its lid. The page is explicit about where it stops, and so is this answer: it does not walk you through the replacement, and your toilet’s manufacturer publishes that.

The bucket, and the argument about it. Catch the cold water while the shower warms up puts a bucket under the clean cold water that runs down the drain while you wait, and uses it for plants, flushing or cleaning; alongside it, turning the shower off while you lather, which several people there grew up doing and others find astonishing. Then the honest part the accounts insisted on: across several conversations people looked at their bills and found the bucket saved very little money, because most of a water bill in many places is fixed charges rather than litres. One household’s bill dropped by about ten dollars a month after taking up every habit on that page, and the other camp calls that the proof it is not worth it. The argument runs three accounts to three, and its decider is where you live and what you value: scarce, expensive or restricted water tips it toward the bucket, cheap and plentiful water tips it away. Two safety lines from that page: standing water is a drowning risk for toddlers and small pets, so pour it and put it away every time; and water that has been through the hot tank or hot pipes is for plants and flushing, not drinking or cooking, because US public-health advice is to use only cold water for drinking, cooking and baby formula, and boiling does not remove lead.

Fix the rate, then calendar its ending. Fix the rate, then calendar its ending is for anywhere supplier choice exists, where the market runs one repeating play: a low advertised rate that expires quietly into an expensive one. Compare only the per-kWh supply rate against your utility’s published default, take a fixed rate you can leave without a fee, and write the contract’s end date in your calendar. Each clause earns its place. The supply line, because a bill is two halves, supply and delivery, and a supplier can only discount the first, so a dazzling half-price offer on supply may be a quarter off the bill. The published default, because that is the price a non-shopper pays and the only honest benchmark. And the calendar, because the business model is the forgetting, and contracts have a way of ending in the peak months. Fixed is certainty, not magic: a fixed rate set near a market peak can lose to a mild variable year, which is why the benchmark matters more than the label.

Keep the heat out before it arrives. Keep the heat out before it arrives says almost all of it is won or lost before the heat is in the room. The single highest-value move is to stop sunlight before it gets through a window and to do it outside if you possibly can, an awning, a board propped against the glass, a sheet on a line, because sunlight stopped outside never becomes heat in your room while sunlight stopped by a curtain already has. Inside, light colours beat dark, which that page notes is the opposite of what most people reach for. The rule that runs the day: windows and blinds shut while it is hotter outside, open when it is cooler outside, and cooler means actually cooler rather than later in the evening. When it is already hot, switch targets and cool the person, who is much smaller than the flat: cold water on wrists, the back of the neck, the inside of the elbows, feet in a basin. Two honest limits: anything working by evaporation needs dry air, and the bag of ice in front of a fan cools your corner while the freezer that made it put the heat back into the kitchen. And the option people skip because it feels like giving up is among the most sensible, leaving for a library or a public building, with official cooling centres opening in many places during a serious heat wave. That page’s safety line, kept as written: above about 90°F, 32°C, treat a fan alone as comfort rather than protection; the sign it has become an emergency is the head, so confusion, slurred speech or someone hard to rouse means 911 in the US, 999 in the UK, your local emergency number elsewhere, and start cooling them while you wait.

Who this is not for. The heat page names two gaps: a room with no window to shade or open leaves you the cool-the-person half, which still works and is not nothing, and nobody there had an answer for a heat wave during a power cut. The leak page says renting is genuinely more complicated and the people who have been in your position disagree, because what decides it is tenancy law where you live; report it in writing either way. And the rate page says if one utility owns your wires and your choices, the levers move from shopping to usage, timing and the utility’s own programmes.