Growing up my Dad would tell us kids if he heard the shower running for more than a minute, "Are you taking a Submarine shower or a Hollywood shower?" He spent his career in the Navy so he knew all about taking quick showers. He would tell us to get wet, turn the shower off, lather up, and rinse. I think the record time for the family was 30 seconds of water use. Usually we felt good to get a minute in the shower. Now a Hollywood shower obviously lasted longer - 2 or 5 minutes. So there is an immediate savings in time for people on the go but how much money can you save by conserving heated water? As water rates continue to rise faster than inflation: save water, time, and money!
Test your shower flow rate - at our house the shower allows about 6 liters/minute or 1.6 gallons/minute of water to flow out. So a 1 minute shower per day uses this amount but doing the math for a month (48 gallons) or a year (584 gallons) per person really adds up. Likewise a 5 minute shower would use about 240 gallons/month and 2,885 gallons/year for each person in our family.
EPA recommends to buy shower heads with the WaterSense label that use less than 2 gpm.
Here is information from the EPA website:
Water–Efficient Showerheads
Showering is one of the leading ways we use water in the home, accounting for nearly 17 percent of residential indoor water use—for the average family, that adds up to nearly 40 gallons per day. That’s nearly 1.2 trillion gallons of water used in the United States annually just for showering, or enough to supply the water needs of New York and New Jersey for a year!
WaterSense Savings
The average family could save 2,900 gallons per year by installing WaterSense labeled showerheads. Since these water savings will reduce demands on water heaters, they will also save energy. In fact, the average family could save more than 370 kilowatt hours of electricity annually, enough to power a house for 13 days.
On a national scale, if every home in the United States installed WaterSense labeled showerheads, we could save more than $2.2 billion in water utility bills and more than 260 billion gallons of water annually. In addition, we could avoid about $2.6 billion in energy costs for heating water.