Down the Drain

In Minnesota, the land of 10,000 lakes, we don’t often talk about limited water supply, but other regions aren’t so lucky. When I was in Atlanta in November, everyone was talking about the drought and there was an actual count down in number of days until the water supply ran out. Other desert cities such as Las Vegas and Phoenix are facing a major water crisis as their population grows and they scramble to find water. It can't all come from the Colorado River forever. The fight over water rights is predicted to be as big or bigger than current fights over oil in the future, as we continue to build cities in deserts. The problem is that the people with most oil and economic power will likely win the war over water. Stay Tuned.

Even though water is relatively inexpensive and plentiful now, it is still our goal to reduce our water use in our new home. There are several resources we are using that provide water reduction strategies. The MN GreenStar program http://www.mngreenstar.org/ lists a number of water reduction strategies that we are following and the EPA’s WaterSense program has created a label for water efficient fixtures.
http://www.epa.gov/watersense/

In my experience researching plumbing fixtures the last couple of months, it seems to be relatively easy to find water efficient toilets these days, but much more difficult to find faucets that are low-flow - at least for residential applications. There are plenty commercial fixtrues available that meet the requirements. I spent hours researching and trying to find low flow fixtures that would meet our esthetic goals with little or no luck. Although there are products available, I was trying to select compatible or matching faucets, shower heads and control valves for two different bathrooms. I had almost given up on the low-flow aspect until Kevin drew his line in the sand and demanded that we do better. I decided to stay with the fixtures we had selected for esthetic reasons and research switching the aerators. I finally e-mailed the technical support for both Grohe and Toto to request low-flow aerators. In both the case of Toto and Grohe, they were able to supply a 1.5 GPM low flow aerator for the faucet, no problem. (Most standard fixtures meet a 2.2 GPM flow rate). Neither Toto or Grohe advertised or had information on their websites about their low flow aerator options, which surprised me. My guess is that there is currently not the demand for this option, but this will be changing in the future. We will likely purchase and use the 1.5 gpm aerators for the kitchen sink, but will inevitably change out the aerators to a .5 gpm aerator in the bathroom lavatories. We'll leave the tub alone, as lwering th flow rate simply increases the length of time it will take to fill the tub for a bath.

Grohe Concetto faucet and Toto Nexus faucet

The biggest water hog and last fixture to get a water efficiency makeover is the showerhead. In fact, the current trend is new-fangled features that actually increase water use. Performance showering” is a tempting trend, which includes multiple shower heads, rain-shower heads, pulsating and variable sprays- but the downside is the isignificantly increased water use (including longer time spent in the shower, I’m sure!) Since Kevin believes in the 2 minute shower, this is not the direction we will pursue.

Finding low-flow shower heads is even more difficult than the faucets. The WaterSense program does not have shower heads labeled yet, but is intending to develop a specification for one. So expect some changes in this are in the next couple of years. Until then, we are going to add the low-flow aerator by Delta to our new showerheads. We're able to purchase these low flow aerators at Natural Built Home in Minneapolis for the price of a couple of pizzas. http://www.naturalbuilthome.com/products/water_saving_fixtures_139/

The Most Important Room(s) in the House

The bathrooms might be some of the smaller rooms in the house, but per square foot, they take the cake on design time- no question about it. The existing house has a recently remodeled full bathroom on the first level, so that has saved us some design time and money. The only work we will do in that bathroom is to replace the toilet with a dual flush Toto Aquia dual flush unit. The dual flush toilet has both a .9 gallon per flush option and a 1.6 gallon per flush option and it looks pretty sleek as well.

The upper 2 bathrooms have gone through dozens of iterations. We originally tried to salvage the existing bathroom on the upper floor. It has the original 1940’s tile and tub. This proved to be too limiting to the rest of the upper floor plan, as the existing 3’ wide corridor would prevent us from getting most of our furniture to the upper floor. Once we decided to demolish the existing bathroom, it opened up a whole series of options on bathroom arrangement for us.

The plan we settled on for the bid documents has the master bedroom toilet and shared bathroom back to back. This allows for a common plumbing wall, which is a very efficient approach. We have a compartmentalized design for the shared bath, so someone (who shall remain nameless) can spend as much time as he needs on the toilet, while others could still have access to the sink and toothbrushing. We initially had only a shower for the master bathroom and a tub/shower for the shared bathroom.

The tub/shower combination is what we have in our current house, but I wanted a better solution to the shower curtain problem. I hate having a curtain and don’t want a shower door that makes the tub impossible to clean. There doesn’t seem to be any good solutions out there, except to separate the shower and the bath. So much to Kevin’s chagrin, I reworked the shared bathroom to include a separate bath. (Men just don’t seem to appreciate the importance of a good bubble bath.) This reworking of the shared bath did result in Mazzy losing a bit of her closet space, but given the increase in size over her existing 3’ closet, I don’t think it will be a problem.

For the shared bathroom, we are going with the entire Nexus suite from Toto. We are working with Ratieken Sales in Minnetonka for both Toto and Grohe fixtures. http://www.raksales.com/ The Eco-Nexus toilet has a 1.28 gallons per minute single flush. The air bath has warm air jets that will give you a heated massage. (yeah!) I have told Kevin that once he tries our new Toto Nexus Air Bath, he will likely break down crying and thank me for insisting on it!

In the Master bathroom, we are specifying another Aquia dual flush and a Toto square vessel sink with Grohe faucets. Look for a posting soon on the exciting tile selections!