Spotlight on Blood Bikes Wales: Becoming more water efficient

Now that the summer period is here, it’s the perfect time to start new habits with using water wisely. Using less water will save you money, lower your carbon footprint, and if you use less water within a manufacturing process that heats water, also reduce your energy bills.

An easy way to save water is to use rainwater whenever you can. For example, watering any plants or gardens, or cleaning the outside of any vehicles. Using your treated tap water for these types of activities isn’t necessary and can add hefty amounts to your water bill.

Blood Bikes Wales

We recently caught up with Paul Kennedy, a Blood Bike Driver from Blood Bikes Wales, a 100% volunteer charity based in North Wales, to hear more about how they’ve saved water recently:

“Blood Bikes Wales is a volunteer charity that transports important items such as samples, blood and human milk between hospitals, surgeries, and hospices. To run our service, we depend totally on donations and grants.

Whilst carrying out our tasks, 365 days a year, for the NHS and associated services in North West Wales our liveried Blood Bikes do extensive mileage, which on average is over 200 miles per day.

As a result of the mileage our fleet of motorbikes get dirty from road residue, grit, mud and in winter, salt. It’s very important to keep these bikes clean to ensure we can identify any external damage to the bikes.

The bikes are cleaned daily and previously we had to rely on our storage hosts for a mains water supply, which meant we had to carry buckets of tap water from a building close by. We were very aware that this was not the best use of drinking water and that we could reduce water usage by using rainwater – if only we had a way to capture and store it!”

“Recently, we’ve been delighted to be awarded a Community Fund Grant from Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water to purchase a water butt. The full team helped to install the collection system and now we collect rain, which is never in short supply in North Wales! The 1200 litre water butt is located outside the bike storage, allowing us to clean the bikes with much less effort and to a higher standard than before.

We are proud to now be using an environmentally friendly source of water, saving on the consumption of mains water and we also use bio-degradable cleaning products to keep the bikes clean.”