Catch the cold water while the shower warms up

Three uses come up across these conversations, and they cover almost everything the caught water is good for. Flushing: pour it straight into the toilet bowl — not the tank — and the bowl empties the same way a flush does, which one person explains is just the siphon working; a bucket of shower warm-up water is roughly a flush. Plants: indoor, garden, patio — the water is clean and unsoaped, and this is the use the gardeners here reach for first. Cleaning: floors, the mop bucket, the car, rinsing things outside. What the water is not for is drinking or cooking, covered in the third question. Beyond the bucket, the accounts carry a set of habits that save more than it does. Turning the shower off while you lather and back on to rinse runs through several separate conversations, and people who grew up with it describe it as simply how you wash, not as a hardship; a showerhead with a built-in cutoff valve lets you stop the flow without losing your temperature setting, and one person uses a five-minute timer or a short playlist instead. Two conversations describe washing from a bucket of hot water — a few litres, a jug, a cloth — as using a fraction of a shower, which is ordinary in much of the world and a revelation to people who've never done it. A jug under the kitchen tap while you wait for hot water works the same as the shower bucket, if the sink isn't full of dishes, which one person notes with feeling. The cistern trick from the drought years — something in the tank to displace water so each flush uses less — works, but use a filled plastic bottle rather than a brick, which can crumble and damage the mechanism; a modern dual-flush toilet has already done this for you. And the cause of the wait itself is worth a thought: long pipe runs between heater and tap waste water every time, and one person found insulating the pipes shortened the wait, while another only fixed it by changing the heater. If you catch rain in a barrel for the garden, one account adds, keep the light out of it or you'll grow algae. None of this needs buying anything. The bucket you already own is the whole kit.

Less than the habit deserves, and the accounts are unusually honest about it — this is where the conversations split, and the split is laid out below. The plain version: in many places, most of a water bill is fixed charges, sewer fees and taxes, and the part that moves with how many litres you use is small; several accounts across separate conversations did the arithmetic on their own bills and found the bucket saved them a few dollars a month at best. Water is often billed in large blocks, one person notes, so a small reduction may not change the tier you're in at all, and in one account's city the price per gallon was so low that a saved flush was worth less than half a cent. One household saw its bill drop by about ten dollars after taking up the habits on this page; another camp reads that number as proof it isn't worth the bother. So if the bill is the only reason, the accounts say, check how yours is structured before you decide — and the answer may honestly be that it isn't worth it for you. Two things the same conversations add. First, the savings are real where water is expensive or delivered by truck, where a well or an outage has made supply unreliable, or where restrictions are in force — several accounts describe the habit as a necessity in those places rather than a frugal flourish. Second, the bill isn't the only ledger. The camp that keeps doing it makes a point the other camp doesn't really dispute: fresh water in a given place is finite and being drawn down faster than it refills in many regions, and pouring clean water down a drain to warm a pipe is waste whatever it costs. The counter — that household use is a small share next to farming and power generation, so one bucket changes nothing — is true and in these conversations, and the honest reply from the bucket camp is that they know, and do it anyway, the way you'd pick up a piece of litter that isn't yours. Which side you land on is a values question, not a maths one, and the page leaves it to you.

Depends which tap, and this is the one question on the page that has a settled answer. Water caught from the cold tap while you wait for the hot — the kitchen jug method — is ordinary cold tap water and as drinkable as your supply. Water caught from the shower or from the hot tap while it runs cold has been through the hot-water system: the tank, the heating element, the hot pipes. The conversations argue about whether that matters, at length, with plumbers on both sides, and the argument is settled by the public-health guidance rather than by whoever sounded most confident: the US Environmental Protection Agency says to use only cold water for drinking, cooking and baby formula, and that boiling does not remove lead. The reasons the accounts give match the guidance — hot water dissolves more of whatever the pipes and tank are made of, older plumbing may have lead solder, and a tank collects sediment and the metal from its own corrosion-protection rod. One person calls the risk overstated for modern copper plumbing, and they may well be right about their house; but you can't see inside your walls, and the cost of being wrong is not symmetrical, so this page carries the guidance: shower-caught water goes on the plants and down the toilet, never in the kettle. Two smaller cautions the accounts raise, hedged as they raise them: warm water that sits — in a tank set too low, in a pipe run that never clears — can grow the bacteria behind Legionnaires' disease, which is a reason to keep a heater at the recommended setting and not a reason to raise it into scalding range; and a couple of people report finding unpleasant things in loft storage tanks, which is one more argument for the cold tap. On reusing the water you've actually washed in: bathwater on the garden is fine if the soap is mild and there's no oil in it, which one account learned the hard way; bathwater in the toilet works, but pour it in the bowl, not the tank, or the soap will gum the mechanism; and washing-up water — grease, food — is never for the toilet or the garden, one contraindication here is firm. Larger greywater systems that plumb a shower to a toilet exist, are illegal in some places and permitted in others, and are a check-your-local-rules question before they're a plumbing one.