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Life Lessons Money Mindset Personal Finance

How to save money on drinking water

When my wife and I moved to a new condo a couple of months back, we were having
a hard time looking for a place to buy drinking water.  On the first week, we had to buy a gallon or two of distilled drinking water from the nearby mall.  As some of you might know, distilled water does NOT come cheap. But we had no choice, we HAD to buy the distilled water because we badly needed something to drink! 🙂

After getting fed up of carrying the heavy gallon of distilled water from the mall to our condo, I asked our condo’s receptionist if they know of any water refilling stations nearby who deliver water to the condo.  Fortunately (or unfortunately), they did!

I thought, finally, here’s the solution to my problem.   Much to my dismay, the delivery service from the water refilling station was far from satisfactory.  First, they required us to buy at least 2 “new” water containers.  Second, they could NOT deliver the water on that day…they could only delivery the next day at 7:30 pm.  And lastly, they stopped delivering to us after only refilling the water containers once, saying we should order drinking water from someone else going forward.

So we’re back to square one. 🙁

Then just last week, we finally solved our problem.  We bought a drinking water filter at a nearby Handyman store.  It’s easy to use and install.  It is safe (so far). And, more importantly, we won’t need to buy drinking water, ever again. 🙂

The cost of the water filter is PhP 2,500 – flat.  No extra charges. No recurring monthly/weekly payments. No headaches.

The filter can be cleaned just by wiping it out with a damp cloth or a scrub and washing it on a running tap water.  No need to buy a replacement filter worth PhP 1,000 unless it is broken.

I made some quick calculations at the top of my head to see if the deal makes sense.

Here’s what I figured. My wife and I consume an average of PhP 30 of refilled drinking water every week.  At this rate, we would reach PhP 2,500 pesos after 1 year and 8 months.  That means we would only get our money’s worth after more than one and a half years of using the water filter.  Hardly exciting. 🙂

But what if

  • you are ordering drinking water for your company of 500 people
  • you own a restaurant serving drinking water to your customers
  • you live with your extended family: parents, grandparents, nephews, nieces and other relatives

Imagine the savings you’ll get just by replacing the delivered/purified drinking water by a water filter directly tapped from your faucet.  What if you only get 10% off of what you currently pay for on your drinking water?  That may mean a monthly savings of PhP 30,000 for your company of 500 people.  What if you managed to save 30% instead?  Or 50%?

The possibilities are endless.

How about you?  How do you save money on your drinking water?