This article by Simon Gear first appeared on the MoneySmart website (www.moneysmart.co.za) in Jan 2012.

What got YOU conserving electricity? My bet is that it was a combination of the flood of publicity during the dark days of the 2009 load shedding and the simple expedient of being flayed with a 25 % increase year on year for three years. Focuses the mind somewhat, doesn’t it?

Until electricity got expensive, no one did much about conserving it. On a national scale, this has landed us with an economy that is now flaying to realign itself to a power constrained future. Generally, the response has been pretty good. Solar geysers are now pretty standard on new developments and every corporate has enthusiastic power diet tips on their newsletters.

Water has always been a slightly easier sell for the South African consumer. Most of us have grown up in households where our parents could remember drought conditions as a first-hand experience. Also, you can see water, so something like a running tap will bring people dashing to shut it off in the way that a burning security light never does. But curiously, we also have a biased view of water. Inside our homes, we’ll shut off the tap in between sips when brushing our teeth but outside in the garden, we’ll merrily water plants that a) shouldn’t need watering every day and b) are likely to get some rain in a few days anyway.

Estimates vary but most suburban homes in SA spray fully half their water onto the ground.  This is water that has been cleaned and piped, at really astonishing effort, often from as far away as Lesotho. Watering your lawn with clean drinking water is not only mind numbingly wasteful, it is also insulting to the billions of people who don’t have the ready access to piped drinking water that we do.

My favourite addition to our house in the last 12 months has been the 3 JoJo water tanks that now sit to on end of my office, collecting any rain that falls on the roof. The building is small, about the footprint of a single car garage plus store room (which indeed, it once was) but these three tanks seem to fill up at the first sniff of rain. Now, my wife finally has the pleasure of guilt free veggie patch watering, often in direct contravention of my weather forecast for that evening.

Water isn’t yet expensive enough to enable the tanks to pay for themselves, but I can assure you that if we don’t all start to wake up to the insanity of feeding kikuyu grass water that is fit for kings, it soon will be.