You know that moment well: You’ve turned on the shower, but there’s no way you’re getting into it quite yet. The water’s not hot enough. So you start your routine, whatever it is — doing some chores, answering some e-mails — while the water runs and runs, much of it already hot.
Shower wonks have dubbed this extremely common pattern “behavioral waste,” or waste that occurs because of human habits. And there appears to be quite a lot of it.
“Typically 20 percent of every shower, the duration, is essentially lost,” says Jonah Schein, technical coordinator for homes and buildings for the EPA’s WaterSense program. “The average shower is a little over eight minutes long, so that’s a good chunk of the shower that we’re not actually being able to utilize.”
For a standard shower head, every minute wasted equates to 2.5 gallons of water — and insofar as some of it is warm, says Schein, “that’s energy-rich water that we’re running down the drain.” And research conducted by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has suggested that the waste levels may be even higher — 30 percent of shower water overall and 41 percent of “hot water energy.”
Run the numbers and there’s no getting around the fact that we have a gigantic problem here, people.
Showering drives almost 17 percent of water use in homes, and an average American family uses some 40 gallons of water per day in the shower.
So do make a few simple changes to save water?
1. EPA-certified shower head. The EPA’s WaterSense program now labels water efficient shower heads, certifying those whose flow rates are below 2 gallons per minute. The agency asserts that “the average family could save 2,900 gallons per year” with one of these shower heads. If every U.S. home did it, the savings on water bills could amount to $2.2 billion — along with $ 2.6 billion in energy bills. In terms of water that doesn’t go to waste, that could save 260 billion gallons each year.
2. A special shower valve. Evolve Technologies has designed a “thermostatic shut-off valve” that can be installed behind the shower head. The device lets cold water flow out when the shower is first turned on, but then tamps down on any more flow when water hotter than 95 degrees arrives. So when water stops flowing in the shower, you know hot water has arrived and can get in and pull a cord to manually turn the flow back on.
3. Save lost energy. A considerably more expensive home retrofit can help your home recover some of the heat that is lost from warm water cycling down the drain. There’s a great deal to be recovered, because the Department of Energy estimates that a stunning 80 percent to 90 percent of the heat energy that our home water heater adds to our water ends up going down the drain. That energy could be used to reheat more water for use in the shower, dishwasher or washer.
That energy can be captured through a drain water heat recovery system installed in the drain itself. The system uses a conductive metal — like copper — to capture some of the heat from the departing water and transfer it to cold water that needs to be heated up. In essence, it’s a way of taking energy that would be lost and cycling it back into the home’s water system.
How To Shower smarter, saving water and energy
