I'm always trying to save money wherever I can. Every couple of months, I go through our family budget and try to trim as much as I can from every aspect of our budget that I can. This month, I decided to trim something that I never thought I'd do before.
Our family drinks a ton of water. The water in our town is full of so much chlorine that if you turn the sink on, you can smell the chlorine so bad that your house will smell like an indoor pool. So, we've always bought bottled water.
Well, I started to figure out just how much we spend on bottled water each month,and I was shocked. We don't even use tap water to cook with. The only thing we use tap water for is cleaning, doing dishes, washing hands, and baths/showers. We use bottled water for everything. We do recycle all of our bottles.
In any given month, we use between 40-48 gallons of water. Our local grocery store charges 75 cents per gallon of water. So that means that we spend between $30-$36 per month buying bottled water.
So I started thinking about buying one of those faucet mounting water purifiers to clean our tap water and save money. Yesterday, I went to Target to check them out. I found that the Brita Faucet mount system was only $19.99 and included one filter. The filters are supposed to last for 100 gallons of water. And the replacement filters cost $12.50 each if you buy them in a package of two. I had a coupon yesterday for $4 off the faucet mount system, so I got it for only $15.99.
So, here's how the math works out for our family:
40 gallons of bottled water X .75 per gallon = $30 per month
48 gallons of bottled water X. 75 per gallon = $36 per month
100 gallons with Brita filter divided by 40 gallons per month usage = 2 1/2 months of filter life
1 filter for $12.50 divided by 100 gallons = 12.5 cents per gallon
that is a savings of 62.5 cents per gallon
62.5 cents X 40 gallons = $25 month savings OR
62.5 cents X 48 gallons = $30 per month savings
So, we will be saving between $25 and $30 each and every month and still getting cleaner water to drink. That adds up to a savings of $300-$360 in the next year!
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Comments: 49
Reconsider also any changes your local water supply may make based upon season of the year or other considerations -- may need more frequent filter changes during the summer than during the winter, due to chlorine changes and stress of higher volume usage.
Pax ... Kihe
We use filtered tap water to cook with, but we still can't stand to drink it. Our water is horrible. We have a filter for the whole house, a filter on our kitchen sink, and a pitcher with a filter on it that we keep in the fridge. I still can't stand the way it tastes! It works for cooking, though, so at least it saves us that money.
We have a water cooler and a bunch of 5 gallon jugs that we use for drinking water. We pay $.39 per gallon when we fill them up at Walmart. We got through about 20 gallons a week.
Mooch
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