Power of the Shower

Last night I stepped into the shower at 9:42 PM and before I knew it, it was 10 o’clock. Was my watch playing tricks on me? No. Do I  know how to read time? Yes. I have a serious problem of taking long showers, and this unhealthy behavior needs an overhaul.

My results from the carbon footprint calculator, found at http://www.nature.org/greenliving/carboncalculator/# , show that fifty percent of my footprint is from flying, and forty percent is from home energy use. Being that I live in San Francisco and attend college on the East Coast, it will be hard to reduce my flight time, but for home energy use (or dorm energy use in this case), I can hopefully lower my carbon footprint in a manageable way.

I consider myself an environmentally aware person. I try to never use a single-use water bottle, I recycle everything, and I always turn off the lights when I leave the room, so this left me with a behavior that I’ve been dying not to address. My fifteen to twenty-minute showers are a huge problem, and I’m sure I am not the only person to have this issue. Assuming that our college dorm bathrooms don’t have a water-saving fixture, one of my showers uses about 4 gallons per minute. I’ll let you do the math.  The simple act of showering lets me daydream and relax under the hot water, allows me to forget about the 10-page research paper due the next day and the mess of papers on my desk, and of course lets time slip away.

My goal for decreasing my shower time is to take off ten percent of a fifteen-minute shower each week for the next six weeks, and then keep that behavior up for the rest of my time at Lafayette. After the calculations, I should be taking 6-minute showers by the time the sustainable behavior challenge concludes. I will also be taking one cold shower a week whether I like it or not. This will help reduce energy use and get me the hell out of the shower! Regardless of the water temperature, I can’t “dilly dally” and I need to speed up my shower routine. I’m concerned that I’ll let myself slip back into my old habits

because I’ll want a deserved break, but knowing that this is an assignment I’ll be motivated to stay on-task and on-time.