California governor Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency in January as a result of the drought situation. The drought is so bad, NASA satellites could see it. Here is a youtube video to give you some perspective.

I am a great fan of the national park system and having lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for almost 5 and half years, I frequented to Yosemite National Park and South Lake Tahoe. There was a point in time when I used to visit these places almost every month for some solitude. Yosemite was always my Spring/Summer/Fall destination and Tahoe my Summer/Winter destination. For whatever reason I have never been to Yosemite in the winter months. I keep seeing photographs of Yosemite in winter and tell myself to visit in winter. I finally did. I visited Yosemite in winter 2013/14. Here is the picture that I took during my visit.

Surprised? If you have never been to Yosemite in winter, then you may think what’s wrong. But if you know anything about winters in Yosemite then you will be dumbfounded. Yosemite is not Yellowstone but it gets pretty awesome snow cover each year that brings water to California. But the above picture taken during Christmas shows no signs of snow. That’s probably less than 15% of the snow for that time of the year. As a person who loves nature and the beautiful snow we get every winter, I almost cringed when I saw this dire snow situation. This lack of snow coupled with lack of rain led to the worst drought in a century in the state of California.

I decided to contribute in whichever way I can to make things better. First, I stopped washing my car. It is a very well known fact that when you wash your car you use a lot more water compared to going to a car wash. I decided to go to a car wash once every 2 months instead of 3 weeks.

Next, I started looking for more ways to conserve water. The immediate thing came to mind was the shower. Growing up during the 80s in India, we never had a shower to take bath. We used fill a bucket with water and take it to the bathroom to get cleaned up. Overall it used take about 2 to 3 gallons of water per person to bathe. Add an extra gallon for washing hair. I have survived well for 22 years without a shower. I did not need a shower. So I decided to go back to my habits. I did a quick math by gathering some data from USGS on water consumption. Typically an average “new” shower puts out 2 to 2.5 gallons of water per minute and the “older” showers put out 4 gallons a minute. I am not sure how to tell if I have the new or old shower at my apartment. So I decided to take the optimistic approach and decided mine was a new shower. So 2.5 gallons a minute. I spend about 8 minutes on average in the shower. So that 2.5 time 8 which amounts to 20 gallons on average per shower. Now add my wife and we easily spend 40 gallons between 2 people per day. Also, we open the shower and wait till all cold water is gone before getting wet in it. That’s another waste. I felt it was too much. So, this is what I did: I went to Home Depot and bought an empty 3.5 gallon paint bucket and a small paint mug that hold about a pint of water. Now I fill up the bucket to about 2/3rd the capacity. I can top it off if I need more later. The more I do this way, the better I am getting at conserving water in the shower. So now I spend a maximum of 3.5 gallons per shower and so does my wife. We were able to bring down the water usage from 40 gallons per day between the both of us to just 7 gallons per day on average. That’s a total of 33 gallons per day on average.

33 gallons of water a day!