Saving Water… Sometimes
Mixed results was the theme for this week in my sustainable behavior challenge. While I definitely made an improvement from my week of observation, there were some things that were still holding me back from being the most environmentally friendly I can be while taking a shower. The main factor for me proved to be my level of stress. For about half the days this week, I was pretty relaxed and not overwhelmed with my work. The result was that on these days, I turned the water a little bit colder than normal, and I cleaned myself right away and got out immediately after. The reduced time that water was coming out of the shower, combined with less heat being used for the water, was definitely a positive thing for the environment and a success of the sustainable behavior challenge. However, on the days that I was stressed, I found that I got very different results. On the days that I was stressed, I was focused on other things and completely forgot about the sustainable behavior challenge. I didn’t even realize what I did until afterwards when I started thinking about this post. I realized that when I forgot about this challenge due to stress, I took MUCH longer showers with the heat at the highest setting. Over the next few weeks, as I get more used to thinking about this challenge, I hope to be able to remember to take more environmentally friendly showers no matter what level of stress I am under.
While I definitely wasn’t the best I could be when it came to the challenge, I have no doubts that I saved a good amount of water by doing this challenge and changing one small aspect of my life. But how much water did I really save with this small change in my life style? As it turns out, it’s more than I would have thought. According to livinggreenandsavingenergy.com, the average shower head releases 2.5 gallons of water per minutes, which is way more than I originally thought it would be. When I remembered the challenge which was about half the time, I would take about a shower that was around 8 minutes shorter. That comes out to an average of a shower that is 4 minutes shorter than normal. That is saving approximately 10 gallons per shower. If I keep this up for an entire year and take 2 showers a day, that would be saving 7300 gallons of water per year, almost as much as a small backyard pool.
And that doesn’t even take into account the energy saved from heating the water. Overall, I thought I could have done better, but this is a great start in saving a lot of water and improving my behavior and making it more sustainable.
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