Making Progress Toward Shorter Showers
A few weeks ago I announced that I would be taking shorter showers and timing them for a month as my DOT project. If you haven’t seen that first post, you can read it here. The first week, I recorded my normal showers as a baseline. When I take showers, I like to luxuriate under extremely hot water, and I like to stay there until the water runs cold. In the winter, that does not take too long (about 7 minutes). To take significantly shorter showers, they would have to be very short.
The trick to taking a shorter shower is to stick to business, meaning no luxuriation or enjoyment of excess hot water: Soap on, rinse, get out. This was very difficult to do at times and on multiple occasions I went on for longer than I should have.
Timing a shower presents a few technical challenges. The first shower I timed, I used my analog wristwatch. However, I could not get very accurate measurements with it and I had to round to the nearest minute. An easy solution I found was to borrow my dad’s digital sport watch, which has a timer function. At first, I left it outside the shower, which introduced some inaccuracies, until I realized it was waterproof. It was perfect, except dad was not always home.
So I asked my mom to borrow her iPhone to time my showers, to which she said, “No way!” She didn’t want her phone anywhere near the shower. Instead, I had to shout across the house at the start and end of the shower and she timed it from where she was. This method was accurate within a few seconds. I always used either my dad’s watch or got my mom to time me, except for one time.
When neither of my parents were home, with nothing else to do, I got my laptop, placed it on top of the laundry rack outside the shower and pulled up a scratch project timer I had made a while back. When I was done with the shower, I shook off one hand and while half in the shower half out, I turned off the water and stopped the timer at the same time. I got some water on the keyboard despite my best efforts but the computer survived.
The project is going well and I am on track to cut more than half of my water usage for showers.
