We plumbers make our living supplying our customers with fresh, clean drinking water and safely returning waste water back to the environment. Sometimes it seems that this service is largely taken for granted.

Long ago, when I was young and just starting out in my family's plumbing business, a local supply house had an old poster of a plumber in a suit and tie working on a drain line and the caption read: "The plumber: Protector of America's health."

Most of us would chuckle at the image of a plumber working in a suit and tie and being compared to a doctor. But for me, looking at that old poster was a sad reminder of how, over the years, society started looking at plumbing as a dirty job instead of a very skilled profession.

After looking at that poster every day, my mission became clear. I wanted to help put respect back into the plumbing trade by educating the general public on how their own plumbing systems work -- and to stress the importance of working with licensed professional plumbers. The exciting thing about getting a message out is that no matter what, if you keep on moving forward towards your goal, opportunities will present themselves.

In the years since, I've been blessed to have had wonderful media opportunities that included my own national TV shows, book deals, and of course this blog. All these media ventures have promoted the plumbing trades, and I believe we're all a little more aware of the importance of properly installed plumbing systems.

Now it's time to take things to the next level and raise awareness of the essence of what makes a plumbing system possible in the first place. That's having an adequate supply of fresh, drinkable water that we can use in our plumbing systems. This brings us back to water conservation.

My new mission is to spread the word that conserving water is a very serious issue no matter where you live in this country. Clean, usable water is a finite resource -- and we all have to start using the water we have left wisely, or else many more areas in America could face water shortages in the coming years.

One staggering statistic that we need to work on improving is that about 50 percent of the toilets in the United States are the old 3.5-gallon-per-flush water wasters. New toilets use 1.6 GPF or less. With every flush, these old toilets waste close to 2 gallons of fresh drinking water. If you add that all up, across the country we waste about 1.6 billion gallons of drinking water with our old toilets, every day!

The good news is that conserving water for most of us can be as easy as one, two, three. All it takes is 3 simple plumbing upgrades to high-efficiency water saving fixtures.

Here's what to change: 1 - change your faucet aerators, 2 - change your shower heads, 3 - change your old toilets. To see my free instructional videos on making these changes and for more information about saving water please visit savewateramerica.com, and you can also take a quick water saving quiz to get your potential water savings. You'll be helping Habitat for Humanity as well. The major company sponsoring the website will make a donation to Habitat for Humanity with every quiz taken.

So, start now and don't feel guilty about the past, because it's never too late to get on board with this important issue. Anything you may have wasted before... is just water under the bridge!