I never thought of dumping the stale water from Kanook's water bowl in the plants around the house. I'm sure after spilling the water on the finished wood of the bay window, that effort would stop quickly. I'm waiting for someone to explain how they are melting all the snow on their property into a cistern for use in the spring and summer to water their grass and wash their car, parked on the grass, of course. Actually, I have washed the car on the front lawn and used to wash the motorcycle in the back yard until the water softened the ground and it tipped over. However, repeated incidents of that did eliminate the need to have the lawn aerated!
Putting politics and emotions about our water situation aside, conservation is a noble effort. In my younger days, the Saturday night bath was customary. Now, I refuse to stop my daily showers. In one of the chain mailings that I receive at work against the will of our IT department, was one speaking of personal hygiene in the not too distant past. I was surprised to see things done to replace the daily (or weekly) bath or shower. For instance, it is why perfume and cologne was in wide use. Another was about the use of flowers during a ceremony. I don't dare go any further than that. Another was an actual magazine ad from pre-WWII days where Lysol was actually recommend for cleaning something other than floors. All this made it clear why the Bible refers to scented oils so much back then.
There is a serious side to this blog however. You know that I'm in the heating and cooling business and one of our products is central humidifiers. Humidifiers evolved from pans of water in the furnace with evaporator plates or water wheels to evaporate the water into the air-stream. What remained was a crusty container able to breed most any spore that passed it's way.
Next came humidifiers with water panels or pads, that had fresh water running over them to keep them clean and help reduce mineral build up. It seems like there is a pattern here. Anything healthy requires lots of water. These newer humidifiers allowed a fair amount of water to go down the drain. I'm sure someone in the city had discovered that they can reroute the drain hose into a pail and water their flowers with it
For commercial jobs that needed lots of water for humidity, steam generating devices have been used for many years. One of our local furnace companies, Mueller Climatrol made a steam humidifier for residential use, but that and the company are in the history books now. Which leads me to the point of my blog. Honeywell has just introduced a state of the art residential steam humidifier. What water isn't boiled off to humidify the home, is flushed out from time to time to keep minerals under control. I endorse this Honeywell Steam Humidifier as the top choice if you are in the market for a whole house humidifier that conserves water. These can be purchased from your favorite furnace company. It is so new that they might not know about it. Ask them to check with their distributor about it.
