Jacquie’s five minute shower timekeeper, provided by the City of Durham Department of Water Resources, kept track of her water usage.
Less than 24 hours after I’d decided to write a post about showering with my Shower Buddy, Buddy died. At some point during the day on Friday, Buddy’s suction cup slipped its grip on the tiled wall and crashed upon the bathtub floor.
Buddy broke into pieces — a bright blue round plastic shell emblazoned “5 Minute Shower. City of Durham Department of Water Resources” with suction cup still attached, plastic hourglass protector still in one piece, and the hourglass that nestled inside the shell shattered into tiny shards, white sand pointing toward the drain.
What will showering be like without my buddy? What will showering be like without a gentle reminder to keep things to within 5 minutes, to lather up quickly, and to jump under the flow with minimal warm up time, all the while wondering how water saving efforts are going down in Tar Heel country?
Jacquelyn Ottman’s book, If Trash Could Talk, inspires a new consumption culture in NYC.
R.I.P. Shower Buddy.
Are you mindful of how much water you use in the shower? Do you shower with a buddy? How is it going?
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To save even more water, you can do what some of Mrs. Green’s followers do–put a bucket in your shower to catch some of the water and use it to water your plants.
I’ve always prided myself on short shower time. A couple of my favorite songs will usually suffice. As I like to remind family members who think I’m TOO speedy, I don’t earn my living rolling in mud, and I rarely work up a sweat in front of the computer.
You’ll be happy to know that replacements for your Shower Buddy are available. Here’s one. [http://www.amazon.com/Minute-Shower-Timer-Clock/dp/B002GPUXM2] And this site has tips and other shower timer models.
[http://www.greenyour.com/home/bathroom/shower/tips/use-a-shower-timer]
So sorry to hear about your Shower Buddy, Jacquie! Sounds like Buddy lived a happy, conservative life. (Get it, water conservation?)
Anyways, bad joke aside, here are a few tips from Water – Use It Wisely that might help:
-Shorten your shower by a minute or two and you’ll save up to 150 gallons per month.
-Use a water-efficient showerhead. They’re inexpensive, easy to install, and can save you up to 750 gallons a month.
Find more water-saving tips, here: http://www.wateruseitwisely.com/100-ways-to-conserve/index.php
I am definitely conscious of how much time I spend in the shower. For me, it starts with doing everything I can to reduce my carbon footprint, but it ends with making me a more efficient person overall. Training myself to take quick showers makes me never relish taking them, even when I’d rather stay in bed for an extra 10 minutes. My rule of thumb is to be in the shower for about a song and a half. Since I play music while I shower, I make sure that the water is off and I am drying my body by the time the second song is ending. That ensures my efficiency and ensures my saving of the planet, little by little.
Also, I am sorry to hear about your shower buddy Jacquie. But now that you have trained yourself so well on the 5-minute shower, I’m sure that you can turn anything into your new shower buddy, and still remember to keep it to 5 minutes!
And going off of Cindy’s comment, my family has been filling up buckets of water from warming up the shower for years. We use it for watering plants as well as providing all of the drinking water my two dogs will ever need!
Josh, the song approach is a great idea for keeping time! And the bucket concept was something I adopted while out in India. It’s wonderful!
What I have done with my siblings or friends is have them plug the tub as they take a shower to show how much water they have used. Sometimes they feel a sense of urgency when the water starts going past their ankles because they never assumed they used that much. It helped them visualize how much they waste and made them re-evaluate their habits.
I have to say, I am quite mindful of how much water I use in the shower. For all of those men and women who consider showering nearly a varsity sport involving shampooing, deep conditioning hair treatments, shaving your legs, exfoliating with a salt scrub, and having to step out for a second to grab that special cleanser for your face, the solution is Navy showers. Turning the water off for all of these necessities will save water and give you more room to maneuver without washing away that shaving cream and hair treatment. You can be in the shower for 20 minutes and still use 5 minutes of water.
I have learned to take quick showers out of necessity. For three years I attended sleep away camp in the woods of Vermont, and for two of those years I was relegated to the “sub-senior” bathroom. You always knew when people were showering because of the screams and yells that would float out with the steam. These cries were not due to sudden changed in water temperatures, but to the spiders that wove their webs at the top of the showers. These were dock spiders and at the time they seemed to be about the size of a dinner plate. They were quite large, but most likely not THAT large. I eventually realized that I had to wake up around 6 or 6:30 to sneak into the senior showers so I could shower without a spider dangling inches from my head. Even though my showers have been blissfully spider free for years, the habit of taking a quick shower has lingered. As well as the tendency to examine the ceiling as I shower.
I was never forced to be aware of the length of my showers until I studied abroad. Even before we arrived at our homestays, we were made well aware that the region was in the midst of a serious drought and that everyone was especially mindful of wasting water with “excessive showering”. In our cultural immersion orientation, the idea of taking quick and efficient showers was emphasized to the point where many of us were too scared to shower in our homestays initially. I had always prided myself on not taking long showers, but even I was scared that my shower would be considered too long by my host family. Showering, instead of being a mindless routine that we do in the mornings or evenings, became a task we had to think about and plan deliberately ahead of time. While “mindful showering” was a new concept for many of the students studying abroad, it was the norm for the everyday residents. It became ingrained in their lifestyles and remained that way long after the drought. This made me wonder what it would take to make a large-scale and, more importantly, a lasting change in consumption culture. Does it have to be something as extreme as a drought? Or could it be something like having a “bathroom buddy” that not only measures the time spent showering but also the cost per minute or gallon of water used as you shower?