How To Reduce Water Waste With Nothing But A Clock
By: Nudge Daily
Tags: Conservation, Nudge, Habit Building, Water

The Situation

There isn’t a lot of freshwater in the world.

There’s plenty of water in general — 326 million trillion gallons!

But only 3% of that is freshwater and most of that 3% is unavailable for human use which leaves only about 1% of the total volume of water in the world to be used to drink, irrigate fields and bathe in.

This water needs to be shared among all the living organisms on the planet — humans, animals and plants and currently, we aren’t doing a great job of sharing.

What Science Has To Say​

One of the reasons people find it hard to make changes that reduce their consumption of resources is because they receive little in the way of immediate feedback.

You can turn on your air conditioning and leave it running for a whole week and the only feedback you’re going to receive immediately is a pleasantly chilled air temperature.

A month later you might receive some more quantitative feedback in the form of a higher energy bill but the impact of your choice on the environment will only present itself to you years down the track in the form of a higher median temperature for the entire planet and who knows to what degree your air-con use contributed to that change.

(If you are interested in understanding your individual impact on the environment we’d recommend checking out the Ecological Footprint Calculator.)

The Nudge​

The fact that showers use a lot of water is not new information to most people.

When I was growing up in Australia, there was a drought that lasted from the time I was 2 to the age of 16.

I remember using a bucket to catch the shower water as I waited for it to get warm enough and then using this water for our garden.

We were always conscious of using water and at one stage, Mum bought a simple sand-timer that would stick on to the glass of the shower door to let us know when 3 minutes had passed and it was time to get out.

That timer got lost somewhere along the way and I found myself spending longer and longer in the shower as time just seemed to slip away with the steam and hot soapy water.

As I was standing in the shower one day, wondering how best to curb my excessive water use, the memory of this timer popped into my head.

The next day, I took my phone into the bathroom and propped it up on the soap dispenser facing the shower. I turned on the stopwatch and started the water. At any stage during the shower I could look through the glass and see how much time had elapsed. Four minutes later, I stepped out of the shower as though stepping over the finish line of a race and stopped the timer — proud of the fact that I’d saved a good 20–30 litres of water when compared to what I estimated was my normal time of 6–7 minutes.

A modern shower-head uses about 9 litres of water every minute. To make life easy I assume my shower head is slightly less efficient and uses 10 litres of water per minute. This makes it very easy to calculate the opportunity cost of spending another minute in the shower.

The only downside I found with this approach is that it took a while before it became a habit so there were many times when I would get into the shower only to realise that I’d left my phone outside.

If you’re finding that this is the case for you as well, a good alternative could be to hang a clock somewhere in the bathroom or you could even try the sand timer stuck to the shower glass.

Overall, this is a simple, no frills nudge that will help you do your part for the planet while at the same time actually saving you money — a true win-win.