Saving water water metres and dishwashers? Are they compatible?

[PavlovtheCat]

I live in a two bed apartment with my DP and 10 month old LO. We have a small garden/yard.
Currently our water bill is almost £50 per month, and we are thinking of getting a metre put in.

We are quite conservative with our water, use DD's bath water to water plants (only a handful), dont have electric shower, share baths a lot etc, let yellow mellow etc...

However, we have a small, constantly messy kitchen which seems to produce an endless amount of washing up, and needs to be done regularly to keep the kitchen from descending into chaos.

So we are thinking of buying a dishwasher, which of course will be used when it is full only. Are they better for water consumption that washing up several times a day? How about a slimline one, which will of course get full quicker? We have limited space so cant have a full sized one?

If they are not economical for water usage, how much more do they use?.

Thanks everyone

Pavlovthecat. Hmm. Well the dishwasher we sold was to someone who was about to go out and buy a new one instead and would not consider life without one, so I know it didn't end up adding to the total number of dishwashers in use as it would have done if we'd kept it. If you bought one though, even secondhand, that would be one more dishwasher as you didn't have one before, and the knock-on effect would be that someone. somewhere would be getting a new one to replace the old one you bought.

I have to say that I sympathise; our pile of washing-up is not a good feature. If you really want a dishwasher could you offset its environmental impacts somewhere else in your life?

The actual impacts of the chemicals used in a dishwasher would vary according to where you live. If you live in a big city, for example, good sewage treatment is economic becasue of the scale and the fact that they don't have to get the final effluent to perfect standards for the lower reaches of a large river such as the Thames to be absolutely fine. If you live in the middle of the North York Moors, most of what goes down your drains will be going straight into habitats that don't cope so well, and where it is treated, the ecomomics of scale mean that it's not very well treated.

It would also be worth bearing in mind that you're already paying most of the environmental costs of providing water in your bill, but that you're not paying the full environmental cost of the chemicals. I don't know if you can get away without using them.