Water and your wallet
That nice warm shower flowing down your back costs a lot in energy.
First there’s the cost of getting the water to you. A lot of electricity is used at the treatment plant and the pumping stations to get safe water flowing under your street. And once it enters your home, it’s only halfway through its energy use. As you rinse the suds from your hair, the water starts its journey to the sewage plant. More pumps and more treatment before it finally spills into Narragansett Bay. The typical municipality with public water and sewage spends more on electricity for them than almost any other use.
If you’re a Newporter, you pay a penny a gallon for water and sewer. But that water’s cold. Now you have to heat it from 50 degrees up to 120 degrees or so for your shower. You spend up to half a penny more per gallon in your water heater.
So what’s a penny-and-a-half a gallon? Well, if each person in your household shortens their daily shower by 5 minutes (I know, I know. I’ve got teenagers too.), you can save $66 a year per person! (More if your shower head isn’t an energy-saving model (2.5 gals/min or less) or your water heater is old or full of sediment.) For a family of four that’s $250 a year in your wallet.
Not to mention that you’ve kept several hundred pounds of carbon out of our atmosphere!
(Ways to gain time in the shower: Turn off the shower while you lather up. Get a low-flow shower head.)
Note: Electricity rates vary from town to town, shower heads differ, and water heater efficiency can range from 95% to much, much lower. Some towns have public sewage, others don’t. These and other variables mean that the numbers above may not apply to you. You may achieve greater or lower savings.