Trim the Fat Tuesday: The Shower Head

We've been meaning to get to this one all summer, and after a few false starts and a lot of time away, we finally managed to

Switch out the shower head for a low-flow model to save on utility costs.


Our old shower head was a (post-1992) standard, 2.5 gallons per minute model. It was a rain-style one, and quite a nice little comfort upgrade when we moved into this house.

But it uses a lot of water, and the extra comfort it offers also encourages loooooong showers. 

Especially if you're under the age of twelve. Those guys have no concept of time, and we are always yelling at them to get out of the shower. Fifteen- and 20-minute showers by the younger set are not unheard of around here, especially if we aren't playing much attention to what's going on upstairs.

Perhaps a timer is in order as well. The most obnoxiously beeping one we can find, to help hurry things along.

Until we cure our resource-intensive progeny of their wasteful ways, the new, 1.5 gpm shower head should help cut our water and electricity bills by quite a bit while we wait for them to grow up. It was a snap to install — just unscrew the old one and screw in the new one. Kirk used some teflon tape for extra sealing power, but this probably isn't strictly necessary. 

And the savings? I found a helpful online calculator from the Department of Energy here. After entering the necessary numbers like our electricity rate and water/sewer rate, the calculator let me know that switching to the 1.5 gpm shower head will save us $191 per year on water and $106 per year on the electricity we use to heat it.

That's a total savings of $297 per year, or $24.75 per month. As always, I will round up. Also, it's worth noting that this very easy switcheroo pays for itself in less than one month. I'm just sorry it took us so long to get around to something so easy to do.

Savings per month: $25

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What to Do With an Unripe Watermelon

Image
Back on the first weekend of August we were so excited to see how big our watermelons were getting. We checked all the signs of ripeness: good sound, firm skin, yellow bottom. So Kirk brought one in: And we sliced it open: Shit. This is not meant to be a yellow watermelon. It only even looks that way in the photo because of the lighting — it's really white throughout. It's Sweet Favorite, and it's supposed to be red.  After the huge wave of disappointment rolled through the room, we all took a bite anyway.  It's not sweet, but it's not sour or bitter, either. It tastes like watermelon, just without the sugar. Kind of like a watermelon-flavored cucumber. It's too big to let go to waste, and we felt obligated to wrap it up and keep it in the fridge until we figured out something to with it.   Dish #1: Watermelon Kachumber Kachumber is an Indian salad that is normally made with cucumber. Here we used some of our unripe w
Read more

So Where's Everybody From?

Image
I don't have any new garden pictures or updates for you today. I have to say, it's getting kind of hard to get a good photo during the one hour of waning daylight left by the time I get home from work. These are the darkest days now, as we hurtle toward the solstice. Without any photos for me to share with you today, I thought it would be a good time to ask: Where're y'all from? If you have never kept a blog of your own, you might not know that the writer of one gets a bunch of stats about who has hit on the webpage. Most of it's not very interesting: I don't care how many of you use your iPhone vs. a PC or what browser you use to surf the web. The one interesting part, though, is the map . Blogger keeps track of what country readers are in when they check out my page. It's fascinating! Here's my readership map for November: I figured my readers were mostly my Facebook friends, and I know where they are. But now my list of countries is gettin
Read more

Last Weekend of Winter

Image
It's the last weekend of winter! Next weekend we'll be beyond the equinox, and the days will be ever-so-slightly longer than the nights.  We still have snow on the ground, lots of wind, and temperatures in the 30s, but we plowed ahead with our almost-spring garden chores anyway. Here's what we did this weekend: 1. Got the chickens out on the raised bed where to prep the soil for planting greens: 2. Poked around the greenhouse tunnels to harvest the last veggies: parsnips and a couple leeks, plus a few leftover fall cabbages for the chickens (which they were very  excited about). We do still have some spinach, mache and kale left as well, but not much. 3. Improved the maple sugaring set-up by building a bigger firebox: Kirk used leftover bricks we had lying around to make a floor (so as not to ruin the bricks on our patio), then got nine cinderblocks to make the three walls of the firebox (solid side toward the fire). He also picked up some steel
Read more