Wesley's Tool-Box

Softrong has touted their faucets' water-saving feature prominently, and I noted that it felt like it was working. But to see if it was indeed the case, I made actual measurements. No fancy equipment were necessary - just a stopwatch and a water jug would do as you can see here. After repeating and averaging, these are the results.

The Softrong shower head did indeed cut the amount of flow by roughly half across all knob settings, consistent with the company's claims. Even better, the flow rate at the highest setting became lower than the US EPA's WaterSense program standard, which is 2.0 gallons per minute or 126ml per second. The kitchen faucet also saw similarly drastic cuts, but only when the "spread" mode was used. My wife preferred the middle ground, which offers less savings but is still better than using the old faucet.

In any case, the replacements were definitely using less water if they were used for a same duration. Now I needed to see if this translated to tangible reduction in metered usage.


And here are the results. Note that, between late February and early April of 2015, Naju Bitgaram City suffered widespread contamination of tap water. It became unfit for most uses in heavily affected areas, and the city decided to not meter the water use during the affected period. However, the hot water use was still metered as you were paying the costs of heating the water, not the water use itself.

Taking this into account, tap water use hovered steadily around 13m³ (13,000L) throughout the year until the faucets were replaced. I saw a drop of around 1 to 2m³ afterwards. In the case of hot water, there had been about 1m³ reduction year-over-year (from 6m³ to 5m³ on average), but it dropped further on a similar scale as the tap water after the replacement.

Here, tap water costs about US$0.75/m³ and hot water, US$4.20/m³. So the reduction of 1m³ seen here equates to about 5 dollars in savings per month. The shower heads cost US$20 each and the kitchen faucet, US$30 - a total of US$70. That means it would only take just over a year to recover the upgrade costs. Even though the water use didn't fall dramatically, the new faucets still turned out to be good investments.

Not being content with just saving electricity, I looked for more ways to reduce monthly bills. There were two major pay-by-usage categories left: heating and water. With heating during last winter, I did some active manual adjustments instead of blindly relying on the thermostat, resulting in significant savings compared to last year. Sadly, it would be difficult to write this up. With water, there needed to be either some change of habits or hardware to see improvements. I did find the right hardware for the job, so I'm going to tell you about it.


It wasn't that my family members were particularly wasteful in terms of using water. In fact, overall water usage was consistently below average for the apartment complex. But hot water usage was above average. I guessed that this was due to heavy reliance on hot water during showers and dishwashing. So I bought some water-saving faucets from a company called Softrong in late February. By puncturing tiny, 0.25mm (0.01") holes on a stainless steel sheet for water to come out instead of using wider (~1mm) plastic-molded holes, the faucets supposedly produce stronger streams with less water, significantly cutting the amount of water used.

It's been about five months since I installed Seojun Smart Meter at home and took various measures to cut down unnecessary electricity use. Now was a good time to see if the smart meter was recording monthly data accurately, and whether my efforts panned out well. This graph sums up everything that needs to be said.

In terms of accuracy, the smart meter consistently reported slightly lower than the default meter installed in the premise. However, it is more less in line with the advertised margin of error (1%) after the initial month and thus I think it's reliable. This is important because the companion app effectively shows last month's finalized data a full month before it shows up in the bill, and the app also shows the forecast for this month. Now I know that these values can be trusted and I can prepare two months ahead.

Moving onto the consumption trends, my home generally spent around 190 to 200kWh in winter, then fell down to the 170kWh range in spring if the family didn't go out on a vacation. This is already somewhat below average for a 4-person family, but I started making the house even less wasteful starting in February this year by making more efficient use of the appliances and changing the lightings and bulbs to LED. Eventually, it has settled to somewhere between 140 to 150kWh per month now. This is a saving of roughly 30kWh, or more than 15%.

Thanks to this and being much more aware of the consumption in real time, I'm expecting about 30% savings in electricity costs in the summer when the air conditioning is in full operation. Home electricity rates in Korea is pseudo-exponential, so you pay a lot less for seasonal increase if you start out from a lower baseline. Recently, I helped my dad cut down power use at his house by lowering the baseline by roughly 200kWh and I think it'll save him at least US$300 per month during summer. I'm expecting that the money that went into the streamlining will pay for itself in 3 years. Overall, I'm satisfied with the results of the efforts I put in.