This was Lawrence Money's headline in Melbourne's The Age Newspaper, April 2008. His Water-Saver story described the indifference of the Victorian water retail companies to my simple discovery - turn the tap down and your water consumption drops! Of course the retail companies' water revenue drops as well, and that opens up a can of worms, as Ken Davidson observed in his article in The Age, Ludicrous water policy puts profits before the public interest. Anyway, thanks to these stories and subsequent publicity many people are now discovering a free and easy way to save water!

 

The discovery that inspired the 3TD approach came inadvertently, through rust blocking up our water supply pipe. Change in our water flow came about so gradually that we did not notice, until one day I saw that we were using far less water than the typical house - and without using any special water efficiency devices. Going back through old water bills established that over ten years, our daily water consumption had dropped from over 500 litres down to around 200 litres. I was initially mystified by this remarkable drop in our water consumption as our household had not installed any special water saving devices (water tanks, low-flow shower heads, etc.). Nor had we made any changes in our water usage, apart from observing the water restrictions. The penny dropped when I began reading literature on reducing household water consumption and found that most commercial water-saving devices work by reducing water flow. When I checked the water-flow at our water meter using the bucket test, I found that we had an unrestricted flow of 33 litres per minute, while the taps in the house had a flow of 5 to 6 litres per minute. This meant that our old home was exceeding the AAA water efficiency benchmark (now mandatory for showers and kitchen taps in all new homes in Victoria).

 

Thanks to our rusted up pipes we had found a way of saving water without trying! Simply let gradual reductions in water flow work their own magic. Fortunately, for people without rusty pipes, there is an easy way to achieve the same effect – turning down the stop tap attached to every water meter. Subsequent experiments with using the meter stop-tap as a water-flow control device, and measuring water flow using the bucket test has resulted in the 3TD (Turn the tap down) water saving method. Only one thing still puzzled me: given the acute water shortage in most Australian State Capitals, why was this method for saving water not promoted on all the water authority websites and “10 ways to save water brochures”?

  

 

 

Meanwhile I had my own job to do, but every quarterly bill from Yarra Valley Water bill provided fresh evidence of the effectiveness of our water saving approach, and prompted more emails and letters. Eventually, one of those emails bore fruit.

      

In March 2008 fate intervened in the form of an experienced journalist, Ken Davidson, who immediately grasped the significance of my water saving idea. He forwarded my email to his colleague at The Age, Lawrence Money. Lawrence, a man of action, phoned me and began asking questions, had a photographer at my home the same day, and his “Water-Saver” article in the next day’s paper. Ken followed this up with his own more in depth analysis, and Lawrence turned to Spring Street and Yarra Valley for answers. He received the run-around from Yarra-Valley and scathing dismissal from Tim Holding. As he states in his article When lily-livered officials go to water, Holding’s reply was that: "There are better ways to reduce water use in households without mandating that every house in Melbourne has to reduce its water flow to a trickle”. Holding ignored the fact that 3TD did not involve a mandated level. Quite the opposite, 3TD urges residents to find their own acceptable water fllow. No compulsion and no cost: just savings of water and money with a simple turn of the tap.

   

 On the back of this publicity came the first inquiries from people interested in trying out the 3TD method. I was concerned that publicity concerning our very low water flows and remarkable savings would provoke hasty action from people unaware that some clothes washing machines do not function with extremely low water flows so I began a blog to provide information about the 3TD method. Advice would clearly be helpful in some cases; for example, one reader of Money's column turned their stop tap down to 8 litres per minute and found that their washing machine no longer completed its cycle. They solved this by adjusting the tap up to 12 litres. Early in July of 2008 this same couple received their first 3TD, low-flow water bill. Comparing their quarterly consumption with the same quarter of previous years they found that their water use had dropped by 25%! Other people also provided encouraging feedback. Even some of the politicians began to take an interest.

   

On the 24^th of April, I received a response to an email from the Victorian Shadow Minister for Urban Water, Louise Asher, stating that she had “submitted a Question on Notice on the Parliamentary Notice Paper to the Minister for Water” about my water saving idea. Although questions lodged in the Legislative Council are supposed to be answered within 30 days, she was still waiting for Minister Holding’s response in July. Meanwhile I had developed a proposal for investigating the use of the meter stop tap for flow reduction, and had forwarded this to members of the CSIRO Land and Water Division inviting feed-back, and received an encouraging response from Dr Geoff Syme and his colleagues in CSIRO's Society, Policy and Economy research program. How welcome it was to find a team of water experts that were open to new ideas, obviously communicating with each other, and willing to give a moment of their time to an amateur water saver. 

  

 A further welcome development came when Dr Syme, leader of the Society, Policy and Economy research program, and a leading researcher in the social aspects of water management, kindly agreed to provide an endorsement for the 3TD project. This was a real boost to my efforts and was sent out with the project proposal to the Water Authorities in our state capitals at the end of April. The proposal invited water authorities to participate in, comment upon, or merely request to be kept informed about the progress of the 3TD project, and was sealed with the new 3TD logo (download a copy of the 3TD project proposal here). Lawrence Money was again supportive and in his article Holding fiddles while Melbourne Shrivels he quoted Syme's assassment that "this project is a highly worthwhile one", and contrasted the Minister's willingness to invest billions in a desalination plant, with his sneering rejection of the 3TD proposal to promote a cost-free and simple method of saving water.