@nottelling From the Huntington Library itself
http://www.huntington.org/water/
We don’t have a lawn. Our front yard is mostly junipers that require very little water. Our back and side yards are intentional meadows, meaning we encourage some plants and discourage others - like knotweed and spurge - interspersed with areas of hostas and various other low maintenance plants.
BB, did you put the water recirculation system in? Any idea around cost?
Also, I’d love to collect water that’s wasted while we wait for the shower to get warm but we have a shower head with a very broad spray. A bucket would miss at least half the water. Anyone else with this issue who solved it? Also, I have drip irrigation so don’t have a need to put water I collect on plants outdoors. Someone mentioned something about the toilet? Would love a more detailed explanation…what are other uses? One would be to save it for the dog (clean water collected from the shower).
Nottelling, we wash sheets and towels once a week. Never occurred to me that there was anything unhygienic about that 
@nottelling Our landscape designer/ botanist is from the Huntington. !! The local arboretums and gardens such as the LA Arboretum, The Huntington and Descanso Gardens are great places to get advice and help. I know that all three have lectures and lessons on water wise gardening.
http://www.arboretum.org/five-non-thirsty-plants-for-your-garden/
The websites of water utilities often have great tips on cutting waste as well as information on rebates for conservation. We did a water audit several years ago, and close to 70% of our usage was for irrigation, sort of a microcosm for the State of California. Front loading washers are more efficient, though I didn’t notice a big drop in usage when we switched to a Siemens high efficiency washer. We plan to remove the lawn this fall, once I get estimates for new hardscape & driveway. Our utility will pay us $2/ square foot to remove green lawn, so we have to keep watering it to get the rebate. I believe a new law has been (or will be) passed making it illegal to fine people for brown lawns in CA, so HOAs won’t be able to cite people.
My favorite drip setup uses 8 port manifolds (“Apollo 8” brand https://www.orbitonline.com/products/drip-irrigation/manifolds-and-adapters/manifolds-and-adapters/apollo-8-manifold/8-port-adjustable-manifold) attached to regular risers to run drip tubing. The manifolds are very durable and allow flow adjustment at each port. The tubing used is also very durable, and you can put a variety of drip regulators on the end. We’ve had trouble in the past with wider diameter drip hoses, the coyotes find them delicious and they deteriorate in hot sunny climates. In general it’s better to run the drip for longer times, fewer days of the week. This encourages deeper root systems that withstand heat stress better. Also, be sure to group together plants with similar water requirements. My favorite look is groupings of agave of varying height and flower color- almost no irrigation required. Unfortunately two of our beautiful blue agave are flowering now, so the plants will die by the end of summer. I’ve been taking pictures of estates in Santa Barbara that have obviously hired professional landscapers and plan to copy some of their ideas.
We have grass front and back and, other than letting the kids play in the sprinkler, have never watered it in 16 years. We just let it go dormant in the summer. We ripped out all the drip irrigation and just yanked any plants that didn’t survive. We made the mistake of planting a patch of corn one summer, used $50 worth of water to get $5 worth of corn. The toilets and shower heads have been replaced with modern low-flow models. We got a really big and efficient front-loader washing machine that cut our number of laundry loads in half.
The wife and I were up in the Cascade snow pack east of Seattle last weekend with our ice axes. Beautiful, but it looks more like June than April. It had better rain a lot this summer.
Collage, ours came with the house when we bought it sticks-on-cement (the builder put it in as a standard feature), so I can’t say anything about how much a retrofit would cost. I do love ours! We don’t have a timer, so it runs constantly (the escaping heat is heating the house, which is ok in our cooler climate), but I think that it could be a good feature.
Magnetron, I saw some reports that the snowpack is only at 25%. The mountains look pretty bare…
25% for our area of the Cascades, 6% snowpack in the Olympics BB. There is almost nothing below about 4000’ in the Cascades, maybe 12" at 5000’ where normally we would still have 10 ft or more. This area isn’t built for hot and dry.
If you have a good sense of smell you should be able to tell when the towels need washing. It’s variable by how clean you get to what sort of material it is.
I don’t iron my sheets, but fresh ones feel nicer, so I wash them enough to get that feel back.
Re snowpack, I am pretty nervous about this summer. Last year D was affected by the Carlton Complex fire, which was the biggest fire in Washington state history, and not being able to contact her and tracking the fire online was scarier than when she was traveling in India when she was 18. Still lots of dry fuel in the Cascades.
Momsquad, one of my favorite things about visiting Santa Barbara a few years ago was finding new plants!
I grow arctostapholos uva ursi, which is a low native ground cover, also called kinickinick, but I have also planted " Sunset" manzanita, on the sunniest part of the planting strip in front of the house.
http://www.laspilitas.com/nature-of-california/plants/66–arctostaphylos-sunset-manzanita
moonchild, The designer I just met with on Wednesday will not do a design without using her company to also do the installation. The original designer, who we used 2 years ago when the landscaping was installed, will do a design for a fee without obligation to use their company. She was booked out for over a month, at that time, so we used another company to do the installation. I had gotten the name of this installer from our interior decorator who initially gave me the name of the designer who was too booked out to do the install. I am meeting with our original designer again tomorrow. I am going to have her give us a bid to do the install, so I can compare the two “apples to apples”.
Finding a good designer right now available to renovate is extremely difficult. I waited several weeks for both and am not overly optimistic our project will be started any time soon.
Thanks, jshain. I see you’ve answered all my questions! It is hard to find someone, and the best ones are booked up. It sometimes pays in the long run to wait for best ones, though. Good luck.
Stupid question but here goes – how do you dry your towels between uses? Do you let them air dry or do you use the dryer? My wall mounted towel racks are not wide enough for the towels to be spread out. Folding them before hanging them means they will still be damp the next day. I don’t like the look of towels draped over the tub or shower. Hooks have robes on them. First world problems, I know, but I’m just curious how others deal with this minor annoyance. Hate to waste water just so I can put my towels back in the closet.
I hang my towels on a hook or over a rack. I don’t always use the same one each day but rotate a few. If one isn’t try I’ll grab another. I do laundry once a week and I usually have 4 or 5 bath towels to wash between two people. When my girls lived at home they each would go through 2 towels a day.
Wash and change sheets once a week.
As far as drought. Our water use is down 50% from this period last year. Last year we had already reduced and I can’t imagine what else we can do. We have over 2 acres and have let most of the lawn area go. All our other landscape is on drip which we have drastically reduced the water amount. A lot has died and we aren’t replacing. I am trying to keep healthy the lime trees and the hedge I have for privacy and the established planting which don’t need much water. The planters near my pool are all dirt since I usually put annuals in. I’m not sure what I will do. I haven’t planted any vegetables.
Last week I filled my fountain with succulents. We have asked a few landscapers about redoing with drought tolerant plants but they advised against it because it takes a bit of what to get even drough tolerant plants started.
Inside the house- we have a recirculating pump so hot water is quick to the shower. I have reduced my height of my bath water. My nightly bath is divine and I hate to think about giving that up but it does use plenty of water. Run the dishwasher when it is full. We rarely wash the cars. My washer is older and I suppose a newer front loader might use less water. Overall we are careful with our use.
We get our water from a reservoir so we are dependent on rain.
I live alone, rarely cook, and use very few dishes. Because of that, I rarely use my dishwasher; it is just quicker and easier to hand wash a couple of dishes. I wonder if that’s a water-saving or -wasting practice?
Re sheets, I wash them once a week but I sleep alone in a king bed. I was thinking that if I switched sides of the bed, I could probably go to every other week. They seem perfectly clean when I take them off to wash them. (I wash the pillowcases 2x a week; like having very clean pillowcases against my face. I won’t change that.)
But if my daughter is home for the weekend or something, I will always strip the bed and wash the sheets in her room when she leaves even if she has only been home for a couple of days. That’s probably unnecessary.
It really is terrible how many teeny loads of laundry I do as a person who lives alone and who wears a lot of dry clean only clothing. But I have white sheets and towels and mostly black underthings. So there are many small loads of darks.
nottelling, They say using a dishwasher saves water compared to doing them by hand. I think that assumes doing a full load in the dishwasher. I would try to do full loads of clothes also. I use Shout Color Catchers when washing darks, especially if there are a wide range of colors and cotton fabrics in the load. These sheets trap colors that come off the clothes in the wash. If I am mixing different weights of clothing in the wash, I will dry them separately, separating lighter weight from heavier weight, so the lighter weight fabrics don’t wrinkle.
nottelling- As far as bath towels, I actually only use mine once, but I wipe the shower doors and handles down with it, so I wouldn’t want to use it again, anyway. I have quite a few towels, so I just put them in the laundry and after a week, wash them all. I’m sure there are more water-efficient ways, but drying myself with a used towel doesn’t appeal to me, at all. Yeah, spoiled in that department, I guess. My kids aren’t like that, though. They’ll use theirs way past their expiration date! Habits from dorm living.
I’ve never understood why one would only use a towel once. You’re clean, by definition, when you use it. Just hang it up to dry.
I don’t even know how long mine last for. I guess until I just get the feeling it’s time for a wash for them. They just get thrown in to the wash with regular clothes though.
I hope you don’t use fabric softener then, romani, because it reduces absorbency of towels. That’s the reason I wash mine separately, but with two people in the house, I usually get a load of towels every two weeks anyway.
Interesting, I have the same opinion as post #37. If you just get out of a shower, how dirty can you be. Interesting how people come here and preach green but can be wasteful. I thought some here on CC criticize the fact that I have a large house and that implies I use more water. Did I tell people that I’m naturally conserve on every facet of my life. I don’t come from a culture of waste. Rant over.