“Firstly, size the appliances to the size of the household. NOT based on “when we entertain,” but based on the modal average: the normal day’s usage. ”

I would even broaden that principle. People may, for example, buy a car with a v8 engine, a hitch, a lot of power, and a high form factor (a big SUV essentially) because of that two or three times a year they have to tow a boat and the four or five times a year they have a big purchase at home depos. But if they got a small super efficient car that served their needs every other day of the year, and rented a truck (and home depot will do that for you for those trips) when needed, or hired someone to do the towing, there would be huge savings in their money and their Carbon use. I know someone who had the need to tow two boats a year, about a mile one way, twice a year, and always bought such a vehicle. When they upgraded one of the boats to be too big to tow, they started having the marina tow it for them. Adding the marina towing both boats would cost a total of about one gas fill up, once a year. Switching that vehicle for a good hybrid (for the range) would reduce annual gas consumption to about 20-25%.

The most-efficient practices are highly dependent on the number of people in a household and their various relevant habits.

Firstly, size the appliances to the size of the household. NOT based on “when we entertain,” but based on the modal average: the normal day’s usage. (This is a particular peeve of mine: much inefficiency occurs when homes and their infrastructure are sized for “entertaining large groups.” Oversized living rooms, oversized kitchens, oversized TV screens, oversized appliances, etc. are the result, with enormous waste. This is like buying an SUV “for hauling the kid’s baseball team around,” when in fact it’s used for single-person commuting most days of the year.)

The correct size of dishwasher is that for which one day’s dishes etc. make up a full load. That prevents the “stinky dishwasher syndrome” and makes the task easy and routine: after dinner, run the dishwasher. (When you have 20 people over for Thanksgiving, do multiple loads that night and don’t complain: the total amount of loading & unloading is the same, the only difference is the number of times you add detergent and press the Start button.)

The wastewater output of any dishwasher is through a hose that’s connected to a drain pipe. That hose can easily be replaced with one that’s long enough to be brought out to the front of the kitchen cabinets, where it can fill a 5-gallon or larger bucket. (NOTE: Be careful to set this up so the hose will not be expelled from the bucket under force of the water discharge: you want the water in the bucket, not all over the floor.) The water in that bucket can be used for toilet flushes or watering non-food plants (unless you know that the detergent won’t have some unforeseen nasty effect on food crops in a garden).

For smaller households, arguably up to 4 people depending on cooking/eating habits, a countertop sized dishwasher is sufficient. I’m using a unit made by Danby that cost less than $300 and does an excellent job. The final rinse is a sanitize cycle that uses the heating element to get the water up to 180 degrees. After that, I leave the door ajar, and the retained heat in the dishes and cabinet is more than sufficient to get them bone dry in less than an hour.

For dishes and for laundry, the rinse cycles are the issue for water usage.

Rinse is basically active dissipation, to dilute the level of detergent that remains on/in an article, to a level that is acceptable. It usually takes two rinses to get an acceptable result, but with care you can get it down to one rinse. Most people use far too much detergent on both dishes and laundry, as evidenced by the suds in the second rinse cycle. (Try washing your clothes with no added detergent: you’ll still see suds from the detergent residue that’s already in the fabric from overdosing on detergent most of the time.)

Detergent manufacturers recommend higher amounts than needed, to ensure that the product does a complete job of cleaning. Yes they sell more detergent this way, but the primary motivation is to ensure that the product works completely, thereby keeping loyal customers.

You can and should experiment with reducing the dosage of detergent in laundry and dishwasher, to a level that will do the job correctly and not require multiple rinses. For dishes this will involve pausing the cycle after the wash cycle, to check that all food residue is removed, and then pausing it again after the first rinse to check for detergent residue on dishes. (However if you recycle the graywater to toilet flushes, rinses aren’t a big deal as long as they don’t exceed the demand for toilet flushes between loads).

Detergent dosage will also vary as a factor of the quantity of oil- or fat-based material to be removed from dishes (or clothes). This is the reason for using a manual dish brush or sponge to remove visible food particles before putting dishes in the dishwasher. The brush or sponge only needs to be damp to do its job, so there’s no need to run the water in the sink for this.

For washing dishes in the sink, use any appropriate size of container to catch the used water, and then dump it into a bucket to be used for toilet flushes. As with graywater from the dishwasher or laundry, use this water as a priority so it will not have time to stagnate (or add a few drops of bleach).

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OK, so now I’m off to do laundry tonight. For this purpose, the clean water input comes from a tank that was filled with the purge water from the shower (the cold water that comes through before the hot water), and the graywater output will also be used to flush the toilet.

All of this stuff is easy if one just gives it some thought and the willingness to experiment.

About showers:

Adjust the thermostat on your hot water heater to the temperature that is comfortable in the shower (trial & error: empirical method). Thus you will only need to use the hot water faucet in the shower, and you can turn it down to a bare trickle while soaping up. This is better than having to rush through a shower at full-blast, and much better than having to fiddle with both hot and cold controls to adjust temperature. For applications that require hotter water, heat what you need, e.g. in a coffee pot or tea pot, or let the clothes washer or dishwasher heat it up for the cycle.

Another peeve of mine are those obnoxious “single control” faucets in showers, that only turn on full-force and only allow adjustment of the hot/cold balance: another piece of incredible waste for no good purpose. To deal with that, get a shower nozzle with an “off” button and learn to adjust that button to the comfortable trickle while soaping up.

Lastly, with a few simple bits from the hardware store, you can build an attachment for the shower that connects via hose to a garden spray nozzle. Using that nozzle to wash yourself in the areas that the flow from the overhead nozzle can’t reach effectively, is more efficient than turning up the flow to the overhead nozzle.

Really: all of this is easy if you’re willing to experiment.

Because all my energy use will be from carbon-free electricity, and it will be cheaper than hell compared to fossil fuels.

Would that that day comes sooner rather than later.