Week #1 - Shorter Showers.

Shower clip art

It has been roughly a week since I started to take navy showers instead of taking my normal 12.5-minute showers and it has been relatively hard to get used to. I started out on Monday with waiting until the water warmed up, got damp, turned off the water, lathered up, and finally turned on the water and rinsed off. I was able to get the time of running water down to about 2 minutes. Trough this I was able to get the amount of water during that shower down to 4.2 gallons, meaning I used 4 times less water than the average shower (1). I, however, realized that I could cut down on my water consumption as well as the amount of gas I used by using cold water instead of hot water. Using only cold water sucks because the average temp is between 37-46 degrees F (2).  I also realized that using cold water would force me to speed up my shower as I would want to get out quicker.  I had decided to take navy showers because, in America, the average person uses 17.2 gallons of water in an average 8.2-minute shower at a flow rate of 2.1 gallons per minute (1). If every person in the US takes one shower a day on average than everyday 5,602,040,000 gallons of water would be used on average and 2,044,744,600,000 gallons of water a year on average. However, I personally spend an average of 12.5 minutes meaning that I would use 26.25 gallons a day and 9581.25 gallons a year. Through this, I have realized that I could cut down on my water consumption by 1250% if I were to take navy showers (3). A navy show takes no more than 1 minute of running water and during the shower, the only time the water is actually running is during the initial rinse and during washing out the soap thus the amount of water used per shower is drastically reduced. The only thing I can really change to conserve more water is to get the amount of time that I spend in running water down by rinsing off faster.  I decided to choose this habit because I will need to take navy showers in the Marines when I am on ships and in combat zones.  Because of the fact that showering is an individual task I have to be the one to mitigate myself because other people can't help me take shorter showers.

(1) - https://www.home-water-works.org/indoor-use/showers

(2) - https://weatherspark.com/m/913/12/Average-Weather-in-December-in-Seattle-Washington-United-States

(3) - https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/26/navy-shower-can-reduce-wa_n_170112.html