In the bathroom.

From the very first day I was able to understand that one of the most difficult moments to save water during my day is the evening, when I do my usual routine before going to bed. Always, after a long and hectic day, I like to relax and spend time for myself. I usually take a bath or a nice hot shower with the music on, brush my teeth and do my usual face cleaning. When I read the numbers in terms of liters of water consumed during what I considered to be harmless daily routines, I was really amazed. Each evening I consume more than the quadruple of the liters that I can consume daily, during this challenge. Frightening. Only the filling of the bathtub requires the use of 160 liters of water, while a shower of 15 minutes consumes 240, not to mention the water that is wasted while waiting for the one with the temperature I desire. I had to make drastic changes.

First of all I decided to completely eliminate the use of the bathtub, to use the shower only 3 times a week and to leave the water on for a maximum of 3 minutes. I had to have other tricks too: 1. Collect clean water that comes out before showering while you wait for hot water and use it to cook; 2. Turn off the shower while soaping and turn it on only for a few seconds to wet and rinse.

Even the time I spend at the sink has had to suffer some restrictions and in particular I have had to pay more attention to avoiding to keep the tap open unnecessarily. When I brush my teeth, I kept the tap open only for the time necessary because it was enough to put a stopper on the sink and brush my teeth by running the water to notice how much water is wasted in what seems like a very short period of time.

Finally in the bathroom I had to learn that, in order not to exceed 60 liters of water per day, it is essential to ration the discharge of the W.C. 20–30% of domestic consumption takes place with the discharge of W.C. Each time it is operated, over 10 liters of water are consumed and often only for a small piece of paper. The toilet flush, which doesn’t allow the control of the water discharged, should be replaced with the new recessed boxes with two buttons, and it is for this reason that during these 14 days I used only one of the two bathroom that are present in my house, the one with the reduced range.