My wife and I are following the NCT advice on changing our baby. Which means that instead of wet wipes we use warm water and cotton wool to clean him when changing a nappy. As such we need 8 to 10 small bowlfuls of hot water per day and it’s really struck me how inefficient the design of our hot water systems are.

Consider our homes, to get a small bowlful of hot water we turn on the tap and let it run, until it runs hot. From a quick search of the Internet it seems that most household taps have a maximum flow rate of around 10 litres per minute. Typically it takes around 30 seconds to get some hot water out of the taps meaning we’ve wasted upto 5 litres of water each time we run the tap until it’s hot.

So what can we do about it? Well some households collect their greywater and will reuse it in the garden, but it’s still an inefficient use of water, not to mention the fact that there’ll now be hot water sitting in the pipes cooling rather than staying in the insulated hot water tank.

If we consider the costs of this in both water and environmental impact (not to mention money) then there is an opportunity here for a business to develop a range of products and services to improve our water usage saving us money while we save the earth. It’s probably only really suitable as an addon to an exisiting plumbing / fittings business however.

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