Seth: Hey guys this is Seth from the REtipster Blog and today I want to talk to you
about a little hidden costs that can definitely have an impact on your bottom line
if you're a rental property owner... and those things look something like this.
Let's get into it.
Alright, so if you own rental properties in a city like I do,
where the local utility company doesn't make it all that easy to switch the
water bill from tenant to tenant when people move in and out and for the most part
it usually just makes more sense for the property owner themselves to pay that bill...
it's a you're definitely going to have to consider when you think about
your overall income and expenses and it's a cost that can be kind of high
especially if you live in a city where the cost of water is high and/or
if you have appliances in your house that consume tons and tons of water and
especially if your property was built in the early 90's or 80's or
70's our prior to that (which accounts for a lot of properties out there)
there's a fair chance that there are some pretty old faucets and toilets and
shower heads in those buildings that were designed long before anybody cared
about water efficiency and one of those things we're going to talk about first is
the toilet and back in the 70's and prior to that toilets consumed anywhere
from three to five gallons per flush
I mean they just used TONS and tons of water and the toilets that are designed
today are much more efficient and the one in particular that I have used in
all my rental properties and have installed in every house I've ever lived in
is called the "TOTO Drake". TOTO is a Japanese toilet manufacture that
I think does probably the best job of any toilet company out there. Part of what I
love about these toilets is that pretty much everything across their line doesn't
clog. They're just designed in such a way that you can flush just about anything
down here (short of a newspaper or a telephone book). If there's anything any
landlord or property manager
does NOT like, it's getting up at 3AM to go unclog
toilets - that's one of the big nightmares everybody talks about and you
can really avoid all that if you just get a good toilet that doesn't clog.
Another great thing about these toilets is that these things are designed to
consume very very little water. This one that I've got here the TOTO Drake has
been out for several years now and this is a 1.6 gallons per flush toilet but
the thing to keep in mind is there's actually two flush modes on this toilet.
If you just hit the lever one time and release it
it's only going to use about half of the tank's water, which comes out to
about 0.8 gallons and if you push it and hold it, then it's going to
use the full tank of 1.6 gallons. So really a lot of ways this toilet is just
designed to only use as much water as absolutely necessary and TOTO has
actually come out with an even newer version of this toilet that only uses
1.28 gallons per flush. I haven't used that one yet but I've seen
it in stores and it seems to be just as good as this one (if not better).
TOTO makes a round version of this toilet which is great for older houses
that have really tiny bathrooms that can hardly fit anything in there that's
probably the one you're going to want to use for a really small bathroom with not
a lot of space or if you've got a bigger bathroom like this one I'm in right here
at the elongated version is awesome.
The TOTO Drake is just an amazing toilet, its reasonably priced, it's not terribly
expensive and it does awesome job, both in terms of flushing and not
clogging and also in terms of not using a lot of water.
The next thing I want to tell you about is this faucet hear from Delta.
This particular faucet uses only 1.5 gallons per minute (if you just turn on and leave
it on) and a lot of the older faucets out there use WAY, way more than this
I mean they're just ridiculous water consumers. The nice thing about this
particular faucet (and really any faucet that only uses 1.5 gallons a minute) is
that when you turn it on to wash your hands or brush your teeth or do whatever
you're trying to do, you'll notice that it actually doesn't make a huge
difference whether you're getting 7 gallons per minute or 1.5 gallons per minute
because you really don't need a ton of water for all those things - so as
long as you don't need it, you might as well not use it. Something else I love about
this faucet is that it's really pretty cheap it's not a terribly expensive item.
To be fair, I will say that this faucet is built a little cheap too,
there's a lot of plastic parts in it, but with that said, I've had this faucet in
my house now for 7 years and we use it A LOT every single day and I've had
absolutely no problems with it to date, so while it is built a little on the
cheap end, and the cost is cheap,
I don't really think it's a problem unless you're hitting this thing with a
hammer, in my experience, it's not something that's just gonna break
because of the "cheap" factor. The next thing I want to show you is
this shower head from a company called Evolve. I just discovered this
shower head and a couple years ago it's pretty cool.
Basically, there's two unique things about - first of all, it only uses 1.5
gallons per minute, which actually isn't that unique, that's a pretty common thing
for a lot of these low-flow showerheads. What makes this one so unique is the
fact that, when you turn it on (and you know when you turn on the shower,
you're typically waiting for like 30 seconds or a minute or even 2 minutes for warm water to start coming through),
what this does is once the warm water starts coming, it will shut off and
then you have to pull this string to keep going again.
So basically, a lot of people, if they turn the shower on and they leave for
5 minutes and all this water is being wasted during that time, it's not gonna
happen with this - and you can actually buy just this little mechanical piece if
you have a different showerhead you want to integrate this little feature into
your existing shower you can do that! And when you think about it, all the showers
everybody takes and all the water that's wasted when people are waiting for the
water to warm up, that can be pretty substantial and the shower, of everything in
the house, is probably what consumes the most water (depending on what kind of
shower head you're using and how long shower you're taking) so this particular
one could be a pretty big money-saver over the long run. Two other things I'll note
just as it relates to shower heads in general - 1. It's fairly easy
for a tenant to take this thing and just switch it out for a new one, so I'd say
all the things that run the risk of the tenant just overriding your decision and
picking something else to use, this is probably easiest for them to do
they just have to unscrew it and put a new one on,
so that's always a risk - however if the tenant does use this and they're okay
with it (or if they just don't know how to switch a showerhead), this thing can be
a huge money saver. 2. Something else I'll note is that I've got three bathrooms in
my house in this thing is only in one of those three bathrooms
I typically use a 2.5 gallons per minute shower head and from Delta for most of my
normal showers every day - that's the water flow that I'm used to and
whatever I use this one, I will say that I do notice that there's less water
coming out.
However, I do know that in a lot of the units I've been in, a lot of times the
shower heads that I inherit with the property are pretty terrible anyway (like
they're clogged up and not working correctly), so if you're coming from
something like that
this will be an upgrade anyway, but if you've got a tenant who has a shower
head that is normally consuming 7 gallons a minute or something like
that, they're probably going to notice a difference with this, but at the same
time, it's not like it's not enough water to do the job, I think most reasonable
people would be fine with this. If you are worried about that kind of thing, Evolve does
make two other models of this - one uses 1.75 gallons per minute and another one
is 2 gallons per minute, so if you think water flow is a big concern of
yours or whoever your tenant is, feel free to use one of those higher flowing
models and that should probably do the trick.
Now the last one I'll mention here, I don't actually have this one in my house
as it right now, but I did have this exact faucet in the previous house I
lived in a few years ago and I can tell you from experience, this thing is an
awesome faucet and it's very, very inexpensive. It's called the Delta
Foundations Single Handle Kitchen Faucet and it uses 1.8 gallons per minute.
This thing is built like a rock, it's mostly metal, there are some plastic
pieces inside, but it really is just built to last and they even have an
attachment you can include on the nozzle of this faucet which restricts the flow
down to 1.5 gallons per minute. If you really want to get the most efficiency
you can possibly get,
this attachment is not expensive and it's just a really easy thing to
include on the end of it if you want to. The thing I love about Delta faucets is
that this stuff is built pretty decent and they're used in a lot of places,
I've seen these kinds of faucets in gas stations and hardware stores,
people use these things long and hard and they really hold up. When you
consider how much water you can save with these things, it's fairly easy to get
your return on investment back from them pretty quickly.
So after you've seen my suggestions on some good water efficient
plumbing fixtures that you've can use your properties, something you might be
asking yourself is - does it make sense financially to invest the money in these
fixtures when you've already got working one's in each one of your properties?
Does it make sense to buy new toilets and faucets and shower heads?
I I don't think there's any one right answer to that, but when I was
making that decision, I took a good look at my annual water bill that I was
paying for each one of my properties each year. I also took a look at the
current fixtures that was in each property, and I have lots of toilets that were the 3 - 5
gallon per flush toilets, a lot of faucets were the really old kind that put
out just tons and tons of water and for me, it was a fairly simple decision to
just make the call and say I'm gonna invest the money now and realize that
going forward, my annual water bill is probably going to be about 2/3 of
what it was in the past because of all the water I most likely will be
saving. And again, things like showers are a little hard to measure because it
depends on how long people take showers and whether or not they switch out
the shower heads on their own, but things like toilets, kitchen faucets, bathroom
faucets, those things are pretty difficult and expensive to remove and
people are most likely just going to stick with what they've got. The way I
figured it was that it would take me a total of about 4 years for me to get
all the savings back to pay for all of these new fixtures and then every
subsequent year after that, I'd be saving about $300 - $400 bucks per
property, per year. So when you consider the long-term savings and the money that
I was both figuratively and literally "flushing down the toilet" simply by
having old, outdated fixtures in each one of my units, it was really a pretty
straightforward decision to just say, "Hey, let's put the money in now and bite the
bullet and then we'll enjoy the benefit of this in the years to come." If you're looking
at the properties that you own and if you've already got a lot of faucets and
showerheads and toilets that are doing okay...
perhaps they're not the most wasteful kind out there or they're sitting at 2
gallons per minute or 1.8 gallons per minute, then it probably doesn't make a
lot of sense (financially speaking) and something else to also consider is the
cost of water in the area where your properties are located. I'm sitting here
in Grand Rapids, Michigan and honestly, compared to the rest of the country, the
cost of water is not that bad, we've got great lakes all around us...
someone in my situation is going to have to wait a little longer to see that
return on investment, because the costs AREN'T through the roof here. If my
properties were in an area with a much higher cost of water, it would be even
easier to justify this investment, because with that higher cost, it would
be that much faster that I would realize the savings that came as a result of me
putting the money into these new fixtures in the first place.
For what it's worth, that's my take on some of the better plumbing fixtures
that I found out there. These have worked really good for me - I'm not saying
there's not other ones out there that are probably just as good (because they
probably are) but these are the ones that I've tried and tested for years now and
I've been really happy with all of them. I'm going to include affiliate links to each one of
these items beneath this video, so if you want to go check them out feel free
to do that (and I will get a small commission from that if you decide to buy something).
You can buy most of these items from a site like Amazon, or there's another
website called HomeClick that I've used to buy several of these things for myself in
the past and I've found they've actually got even better deals in some cases
so feel free to check that out too, I'll have links to them as well. I hope you
found that helpful and somewhat informative and if you decide to move
forward with any improvements to the plumbing fixtures at your place feel
free to use any of these suggestions
and I think it think you'll be pretty satisfied with them. Thanks for watching
and I'll talk to you later.