Navy Showers

One thing I have started doing that costs us nothing is "navy showers".

Edwin, what do you mean by that exactly? Are you only taking showers on boats?

Haha, no, I don't mean that. What I mean is that I only turn the water while rinsing. Basically, I turn on the water at the beginning of the shower to get it nice and hot, then wet myself, and turn the water off again. Then, soap and shampoo up, then turn on the water again, rinse, turn it off again. (Lather, rinse, repeat until you're clean.)

A typical shower uses about 40 gallons (150 L) of fresh water from the tap, or if you are being especially luxurious, up to 60 or 70 gallons (225 to 260 L) of water. A navy shower can use as little as 3 gallons (11 L). I think I probably don't use that little. More like 5 to 10 gallons, especially in the winter when the initial hot water feels so good when it is cold in the house.

Why is This a Green Thing to Do?

Water must be pumped through pipes to get to your house. It is estimated that about 6% of all electricity used in California today is used to pump water. So, if you save water, you save electricity, and that's many tons of carbon not going into the air as a result of burning the coal necessary to generate the electricity to pump the water.

Also, water is scarce here in California. Saving water is just generally a good idea to make sure we all have enough of it.

In a typical house, about 18.5% of the fresh water is used by baths and showers. If you reduce your water consumption for showers to 1/4 of the original amount, this means you are saving almost 14% of your total water usage for the whole house. That doesn't sound like much, but it doesn't really cost you anything to do it, and it won't be the only thing we will be doing to reduce our water usage.

The savings don't stop there, though. Most of the water used in a shower is hot water that came from your boiler. Using less hot water means you will need less energy to heat up that water. Approximately 13% of the energy your home uses goes to water heating, typically done with natural gas, and a majority of that goes towards showers. If you reduce that by three quarters, that is 5 to 10% of your total gas bill saved right there.

Later, if we can afford it, we will put in tankless water heaters which will save even more on the gas bill. A dream would be to put in solar heating as well, but that sounds very expensive. We'll see.

So not bad, eh? Try it yourself and see.

I'll look closely at my next quarter's utility bill and see what affect I have had and report back later in another blog posting.