Do Shower Heads Dream of (Hydro-Electric) Sheep?

I already know that I take showers that are way too long. I spent my entire last post trying to shame myself into fixing my addiction. So this past week has been a little bit of a painful experience. I wanted to record exactly how long I spent in the shower on any given day to find out the total for the entire week. Here’s the breakdown:

Monday- 8:00-8:17

Tuesday- 9:03-9:16

Wednesday- 8:05-8:16 (If only I could have been 1 minute faster)

Thursday- 8:57-9:13

Friday- 10:12-10:29

Saturday- 11:53-12:19

Sunday- 10:43-1-:58

Its horrifying, I know. Just to put all of this into perspective, I spent a total of 105 minutes in the shower over the course of a week, or just shy of 2 hours. That’s an ENORMOUS amount of water wasted. I could easily trim that down to an hour in the shower per week, cutting out 45 minutes of unnecessary water use. Friday through Sunday are the biggest offenders here. They also happen to be the days where I don’t have any classes, or in Friday’s case, am done in the morning. If I have nothing to get out of the shower for, I guess I lose track of time and take longer. The weekdays in comparison are shorter, but not by much. Having class within an hour of waking up gets me to shower faster on most days. I’ve come to the conclusion that I shower much longer in the mornings because I am tired. When I sometimes shower in the afternoon or at night, my showers are drastically shorter. I think rolling out of bed and immediately going into a nice, hot shower isn’t very conducive to efficient bathing.

In order to make myself feel better, I looked at a study conducted by BBC (Hendrickx, 2011 about people’s showering habits in Great Britain. The average shower time is 8 minutes (Wow, I feel like a terrible person; mine is 15), using up just as much water as a bath. Excessive shower times have been attributed to 2 main things by behaviorists; most people are bad at estimating how much time something actually takes, and the fact that many people are unaware that excess water use from showering is harmful to the environment. Sure, we know its bad to have our air conditioner on all the time, so we turn it off. But not many people think the same about their shower. Both of these factors apply to me as well. I know for a fact that I am terrible at estimating how long something will take, so that’s a definite. Before doing this blog entry, I was also ignorant to the fact that showers can be just as bad for the environment as a car. Its slightly comforting to know that other people take long showers for the same reasons that I do, but something still needs to be changed.

Source: Kinver (November 22, 2011 at 11:06). People’s showering habits revealed in survey. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15836433