by F.M. Leith

Created on: November 24, 2008

With just a little time and effort, you can save a surprising amount of water and money by taking an eco-friendly shower.

Taking an eco-friendly shower is not a new idea in this age of natural resource awareness. My father was aboard an aircraft carrier in the 1960's. He referred to the following shower method as a "shipboard shower". As funny as it sounds, you just can't waste good water while you're in the middle of the salty ocean

When you take an eco-friendly shower, rinse off and then shut the water off. With the water off, go about your normal shower routine. When you are finished, turn the shower back on to rinse. If you condition your hair, turn the water off again. It may be appealing to use the leave-in type of conditioner so that you can skip this step altogether.

Now, you might wonder exactly what you have saved by turning that water off while you washed, so here's the math:

In order to find out how many gallons per minute your shower uses, stop the tub and run the shower for 1 minute and see how much water you have. For example, if you take a 6 minute shower with an older shower head that uses 4 GPM, you will use 24 gallons of water. Showering every day will require 8760 gallons of water per year. If you can cut that time in half by using the eco-friendly shower method, you will only use 4380 gallons of water a year.

Newer low-flow shower heads use 2.5 GPM at most. A 2.5 GPM shower head used for a 6 minute shower will only use 15 gallons of water. That's only 5475 gallons per year, and if you take an eco-friendly shower with an eco-friendly shower head, you can cut it down to about 2737 gallons of water per year!

So now you may have saved about 6000 gallons of water per year, per person. What does this mean? Besides just saving that water, think of this: Your hot water heater did not have to heat all that water. Maybe your electric well pump did not have to pump all that water into your house. If you have municipal water, you will save on the water bill.

Taking an eco-friendly shower takes some getting used to, but the energy, water, and money savings make it worth getting used to.

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