Sonoma County Water Shortage

Today the newspapers were reporting on the deep drought that Sonoma County is currently suffering. So what are some things you can do to reduce your water consumption if the City/County enforce a 30-50% reduction in end user consumption? The average US household consumes 350 gallons of water per day. Water rationing would require you to cut that by 105-175 gallons per day.
Here is the typical break down of how we use water in our homes:

1. Toilet 26.7%
   
2. Clothes Washing 21.7%
3. Shower 16.8%
4. Faucet 15.7%
5. Leaks 13.7%
6. Everything Else 5.3%
   

I thought I would focus on toilets, because they are one of the single largest users of water in your home. Older toilets used 3-5 gallons of water to flush. There are two ways that I see that you can reduce your toilets consumption; replace it or tweak it.
The tweaking is fairly straight forward, first, make sure it doesn't leak. Your local water agency should be able to provide you with a free leak test to determine if your toilet is leaking. Water leaking from the tank to the bowl will result in a constant drizzle of water down the drain and intermittent refilling of the tank. Since most residential toilets work on the principle of the siphon, you may never see the water going down the sewer line. The leak test will put dye into the tank which if you have a link will result in a change in color for the water in the bowl.
Having fixed any leakage, you can also reduce the amount of water used per flush by placing some ballast in the tank, you can use a soda or water bottle filled with water to displace its equivalent amount of water entering the tank. This will directly reduce the amount of water per flush by the amount of water displaced. However, because your old toilet isn't designed for the reduced amount of water, flush performace will be affected. There is no use reducing the amount of water in a flush by 2 liters only to have to flush twice every time you use the bathroom.
So, maybe you would rather buy a new toilet. You have two basic options, a high efficiency toilet (HET) with a reduced amount of gallons per flush or a dual-flush toilet with two flush options (typically up for #1 and down for #2). Home Depot lists 3 HETs for between $128-149 each. It lists a dual flush option for $289 online purchase only (and currently out of stock). Both offer huge savings over older models, but the HETs offer only .35 gallons savings over much cheaper 1.6 gpf toilets that are readily available. The dual-flush is a little harder to figure. The #1 flush uses about half of the water over a conventional toilet, but uses the same amount for a #2 flush as a typical 1.6 gpf toilet. So it depends on your families usage patterns how much you can save in that way.
Ultimately, a more efficient toilet will help to reduce your water usage, depending on what you currently have, it could cut your water consumption from toilet use by 75% up to 70 gallons per day!
Next time I will write about clothes washing machines, the #2 water consumer in the home.