As a family that has never owned a tumble drier, I like to think that we have added hundreds of gallons of water back into the environment due to the evaporation from our weekly washing.

My best tips for saving water are as follows:-

If you are fortunate to have a bath with shower attached you can save enormous amounts. Keep the plug in the bath and use the ‘dirty’ water to flush the toilet. The lifting of full buckets is excellent for exercising arm muscles too.

Always have a washing-up bowl in the sink. Begin by swilling out dishes with a little of the soapy water and tipping it down the drain. The water in the bowl stays clean and does not need frequent changing.

We have a bathtub which I tell visitors is my ‘lavoir’. Until as late as the 1950’s some rural French housewives still needed to take their laundry to a communal washhouse – un lavoir. My bath is used for washing pillows, duvets and winter woolies which drip dry in the garden in the summer sun. Plants do not seem to mind a little soap judging from the size of my blackcurrants and blackberries last year. Looking at experiments online, plants were affected negatively, but they were in pots. I don’t use recycled water on pot plants.

A rain-water recuperation system collects water through the winter and provides many litres for use during summer droughts.

Invest in a steamer. Several different vegetables can be cooked at the same time over one pan of boiling water. Steaming is much better at preserving the vitamins. Whereas, boiled vegetables lose their goodness into the water that is then thrown away!

Boiling a kettle full of cold water is more economical, as a water saving method, than running a tap until the water is hot.

French people drink bottled water in preference to tap water. Even children will refuse a glass of tap water. Yet those bottles once opened, are often discarded if not used immediately. Old lead ‘ plomb’ water pipes used to be common, but their use was forbidden in 1995. Lead plumbing (from the word ‘plomb’) had to be replaced by 2013. French people could save the underground water supplies by investing in a glass jug and drinking tap water at meal times.

Our household consumption of water is usually so low that when we had a student staying with us for a few months, we received a letter from the water company asking us to check to see if we had developed a leak somewhere in our pipes!