If you have rain barrels, you’ve probably had no trouble keeping them full, with the heavy rains last month. Collecting rain is a great way to save water for outdoor use — gardens, cleaning lawn furniture, washing windows, watering livestock.

Using rain water for lawn and garden use can save an average homeowner around 1,300 gallons of water over the course of a summer, according to Environmental Protection Agency estimates.

Americans use a lot of water — close to 70 gallons of water a day, per person. (The breakdown, from the American Water Works Association, is here.) That’s up significantly in the past 40 years as we’ve become more dependent on washing machines, dishwashers and other appliances.

So what’s the big deal? Why should we worry about using lots of water?

It takes energy (and costs money) to pump water from your well, or to filter, pump and treat water from a reservoir. More energy is needed to pump it into your house, and to heat it. Water we use (water that is flushed or goes down the drain) needs to be cleaned — either in waste water treatment plants or by being filtered and recharged through septic systems — before being returned to the earth.

Clean water is a finite resource. A growing global population and a growing urban population means water use continues to escalate. Droughts reduce the amount of water available in many areas, from Africa to Atlanta.

Conserving water is essential for the health of our planet, and for the people who live on it.

And saving water is easy. Think about whether you really need water running down the drain. You can turn off the water after you wet your toothbrush, then turn it on again for rinsing. Turn the water on and off as needed while hand washing dishes — it doesn’t have to run constantly. Soak pots and casserole dishes before washing them to ease off that baked-on-crud, instead of letting them sit under a stream of hot water. Turning off the water while shaving can save you 100 gallons a week.

For more tips on saving water every day, check out these sites here, or here, or here.

For information on how to build a rain barrel, click here, or here.

Do you have a trick for saving water to share with Greenpoint readers? Comment below, or email greenpoint@dailygazette.net.