Bring your own water and tap into savings

To guard against dehydration and heat exhaustion in the summer heat, make sure your kids have easy access to water so they can drink at will. But instead of buying bottled water at $1 to $2.50 a pop when you’re traveling and when you’re at the beach, the park and at summer festivals, bring reusable water bottles with water from home wherever you go if you haven’t been doing that already.

“The average family can save $600 per year by filtering their own water instead of buying bottled water,” says Nathan Howard, a senior scientist for Pur.

I just started packing bottles of home-filtered water for my family and I can already feel the savings at the supermarket checkout. Filtered water makes sense for us because we’ve got funky-tasting well water and aging home pipes. Here's what Consumer Reports has to say about water filters.

But if we had clean city water, I might even be tempted to skip the filtration system altogether and fill our bottles straight from the tap. The only downside I can see to filtering are the start-up costs ($20 to $30 for a filtration pitcher or $25 to $50 for a filter that snaps right on your kitchen spigot) and the need to change the water filters, which will run you $20 every two to three months.

But that’s nothing to what we used to spend on bottled water. Over the course of a really hot day’s outing, my family of four has been known to go through three to four bottles apiece, which translates to about $32 just on water. Gulp!

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