Reported in today’s Daily Telegraph:
When it comes to singing in the shower, U2’s three-minute ditty Desire is in, but Led Zeppelin’s epic Stairway to Heaven, at eight minutes - is definitely out.
Opposition environment spokesman Peter Garrett has produced his top 10 favourite shower songs that come in under four minutes, to encourage Australians to take shorter showers.
One of the more creative ways to keep your showers short!
Another is getting a shower timer, like these ones available through WWF partner Neco. Or this one from Todae.
Typically, showers are the biggest users of water in the home, and your hot water service also consumes around 15% of household electricity. So by reducing the length of your shower (or installing a AAA-rated shower head) you can reduce your water and electricity bills, while also conserving a precious resource.
Image by madnzany at flickr
We have installed a stopcock over our showerhead. We do not use the taps,this means that the temperature is already adjusted-no wasted water,no fiddling toget the right temperature.
We use water to get wet all over. switch off at the stopcock,soap all over and then push the stopcock to rinse all over. Saves a lot of wter when washing hair too.
i dnt think this will work that well because in my family we have our songs playing but the problem is is that we have more than the one song on the cds and they play through therefore we are in the shower longer waiting to listen to the song we want to hear or the whole thing
Even better … use a water-saving showerhead to have your 4 minute shower!
wooop i will definatly try to start this at the moment im on two songs so ill do my best to make it one. .
Changing the habits of people is all well and good, and definitely something that needs to be addressed but we should be looking to societies that have addressed these issues successfully in the past. Habitual changes can only be made succesfully if the infrastructure is changed. Something as simple as insulated water pipes being compulsory in any new buildings has been proven to save enormous amounts of water. Proper insulation in walls saving on energy etc. We need to learn how to construct sustainable environments rather than trying to adapt to unstastainable one’s. Ideas such as singing in the shower are creative but provide no long term solutions. We have to dig further into the problem and start looking for the real cause of the problem, which is not the inhabitants but the environment itself.
Young Inventors showed an invention that holds 4L of shower water and recycles it while heating it so you can stand under a hot shower as long as you like but not waste anymore water - where can I get one of these? And I guess the main catch is - is it usable in a rental property?
I agree with Ville above as well. Many showers in rentals I’ve lived in are constantly going cold then hot so I use even more water waiting for the right temperature so I can stand under it without freezing to death or suffering third degree burns.
Perhaps a category on what people in rental housing can do would be great. Unfortunately we can’t install half of these awesome appliances available because the house does not belong to us.
Hi Belinda.
I agree - I really struggled when I was renting. And now I’m in an apartment I’m having similar issues with the centralised services…
One of the key issues with renting is that the cost benefit is to the renter, but the up-front cost is to the owner. Same for apartments - the up-front cost is to the developer, the cost benefit is to the owner. I was chatting about this with someone on a blog recently, but I can’t recall where…
I’ve been thinking about what sort of system might be possible that shifts things around so that the developer or owner gets (at least a bit of) the cost benefit to make it more attractive. So far legislation and some form of government scheme is the best I’ve come up with - but I’d love to hear other ideas that might work…
the main issue I believe with continuing water shortages, is not that we necessarily have less clean water for consumption from drought etc…but it is that so much of our water becomes polluted with everyday toxix household chemicals and the toxins from industry.
if we really want to solve the clean water problem…we need to become more efficient and move towards an economy where all cleaning products, paints etc etc are totally biodegradable, and produced in a responsible fashion.
A recent statistic came out that over Two-thirds of china’s fresh water resources are polluted to the point of dangerous toxicity….is that what we should be calling progress???
i LOVE the shower song idea! my boyfriend spends waaay 2 long in there….. does anyone know the 10 songs Peter Garrett reccommended??
ta,
xx