When you live in a country that has only a few periods when rain is likely, it really focuses your mind on saving water where ever you can.

Unlike most of the cities that have state-supplied water from the water company RAMSA, we actually have our water delivered by a lorry which fills up our well in the garden. As you can imagine, this water is untreated in any way and so in that state is not really fit to drink without some treatment or other.

Drinking water is normally supplied on 5lr plastic containers but for us, we wanted to stop using as much plastic as we could, so buying these bottles as a single-use plastic goes against our principles.

So what we decided to do is invest in a Reverse Osmosis water purifier for all our drinking water needs, removing the plastic bottles and giving us a good supply of drinking water. We also invested in a UV based anti-bacterial unit to make sure any nasties are killed too (you can never be too careful!).

The suppliers fitted in really quickly and soon we had a reliable and safe water source – sans plastique! The unit fits under the sink and has four changeable filters which get swapped every year, so the running costs are much cheaper than buying bottled water – the ROI on this unit was about 4 months. Our neighbor also kept coming round to fill a bottle too, so we saved a bit more plastic along the way.