Week 1: I’ve caught a cold
Let’s be honest: I have never been a particularly waste-and-savings-conscious person, not because I don’t care about the environment, money and stuff, but simply because I love comforts. So this “challenge” to try to live using a maximum of 4KWh of energy per day immediately proved particularly tricky for me. Leaving aside my habits, I live in a rather large apartment, together with my parents, my sister, my dog and my 4 cats: there is no shortage of rooms, lights and appliances. Nor is there any shortage of opportunities to use all energy-using devices, multiple times a day. So when I started studying the situation to see where I could save energy, I was spoiled for choice as to where to start.
In order not to annoy my family members too much with this “experiment,” I decided to focus on myself. What is the place where I use most of the energy in the house? Definitely the bathroom: between the boiling hot showers I take daily, the hair dryer, the straightener and the optical lamp I use for skin care, tons of watts of energy are wasted per day. So with this knowledge and full of purpose, I decided to minimize energy consumption in the bathroom: no more hair dryers, no more hair straighteners, and only short, cold showers.
On Friday 16/09, after returning from college, I took the first cold shower of my life: it was awful. The only good thing about it was that it lasted only five minutes, then I came out shivering trying to tell myself that cold water is actually good. But that was only the first part of my new bathing routine, because afterwards I let my hair dry without using a hair dryer. It took forever and the result was not even close to what I usually get, but I had to stay strong and didn’t give in to the temptation to fix them with the hair straightener. I just brush them and hope for the best.
The next day, although I had a party to attend, I decided that repeating all the “shower operation” was not necessary at all. I just take a quick cold shower without washing my hair and it was not as bad as the first time. I was thinking I could actually make an habit of it, but I was wrong. The combination of wet hair, rains and much cooler temperatures ended up in me catching a bad cold.
So I understand that for now I can’t do without the hair dryer, maybe I’ll try again next summer. But I also managed to cut down the number of showers I take per week, so I call it a half victory. I will find other ways to save the energy I’ll use to dry my hair.
