Natural Habitat

The House We Live In: A Series on Building the Sustainable Home in Tucson, Arizona

 

Some friends and I took a mini-vacation in L.A. this weekend. We got an Airbnb that seemed to have been remodeled pretty recently, with a clear bent toward some water, energy, and space-saving features. I suppose it’s unsurprising that a California property was loaded up with water-saving features, but I had fun seeing them in action. It’s one thing to read reviews of a showerhead or to try to guess what the difference between 2 gallons/minute and 2.5 might feel like, and quite another to wash your hair under one at the end of a long drive. It was also fun to see a clean, modern-looking place that wasn’t marketed as “green” but incorporated fixtures and features designed to conserve. It feels like progress–the slow cultural realization that this has to be the mainstream.

Early on we’d had some discussion about whether dual-flush toilets were worth it. Some sources said they didn’t end up saving much. But ultimately the advice we got was to get them. This house had two of them. I found myself wondering if they left the WaterSense sticker on on purpose, or if nobody ever got around to taking it off. Either way, it worked well as far as I could tell (and there were six of us in that house for the weekend), and was easy to use. It was a subtle feature in a house that looked polished and nice. There was no hint of crunchy hippie house in there. Those are in my plan; conveniently enough, the model we’d selected while in the phase of thinking we didn’t need dual-flush comes in both versions. 

Then there were the showerheads. I climbed up on the edge of the tub to take a look–which I managed to do without slipping and injuring myself–and discovered them labeled as 2 gpm. Not extraordinarily low, but still meets the WaterSense requirement, certainly less than “standard” new fixtures, and far less than older fixtures. I honestly didn’t detect any shortcoming. It was better pressure than the old showerhead in the rental I live in now. In fact, if I hadn’t climbed up there to check, I wouldn’t have had any reason to think it was a low-water-use model. The ones we’ve selected for my place use 1.75 gpm, and I’d been proceeding on the theory that the showerheads themselves are really pretty cheap so if they weren’t working out they’d be fairly easy to switch out. But now any concerns I’d had based solely on the numbers are somewhat allayed.  

Finally, it had motion-sensor light switches. I never quite figured out how they worked–they did not turn the lights on, as far as I could tell; they only turned them off. But I’m pretty well trained to turn lights off when I leave a room, so I never really saw them work. It wasn’t something I considered for my house, and although this stay made me think about them, I can’t really think of a reason why I’d need them. It makes sense if you want to save energy and you don’t know who’s going to be using the space. But if it’s just me, it may not matter.

Just one house, I know. But it was a nice boost to see, in another drought-plagued community, the seemingly commonplace use of what not long ago were fringe products. It was fun to see a clean, modern design seamlessly incorporate these features. Plus it was just fun to get away for the weekend with friends!