Maximizing your comfort/convenience to eco-friendliness ratio

At some level, all of us want to save our planet, and we are willing to make sacrifices toward the cause.  Just how large of sacrifices we are willing to make, giving up personal comforts and conveniences, is different for everyone.  It’s all about maximizing your ratio of personal comfort/convenience to Eco-friendliness.

Try hauling a boat with a Toyota Prius, or keeping bags of recyclables in your apartment for weeks.  You can reduce your energy consumption by not heating or cooling your house all year, but tell that to someone who lives in Alaska, or Arizona.  Not convenient or comfortable.

However there is one area where we can all help out while actually increasing our comfort; in the shower.  The average person in the US showers once per day and takes 10 minutes to do so.  In a household of 4 people that’s 40 minutes of running the shower every day.  We could reduce our water usage by taking shorter showers, or showering less, but that’s not always convenient, and most would agree it’s not comfortable either.

Instead, we can reduce the amount of water we use by installing a water conserving shower head.  It’s simple, it’s inexpensive, it’s fast, but have you used a common water conserving shower head before?  Most are what we call “low flow” which reduces the water by simply restricting the amount of water coming through the head.  This results in a dribble which reduces your comfort level, and most times increases the time spend in the shower trying to rinse the soap off your body.  Most people are put off by these “low flow” heads and simply go back to their water guzzlers.

Now there is a way to save in the shower and actually increase your comfort level.  By installing a self pressurizing, water conserving shower head, you can reduce the amount of water you use while avoiding the weak dribble.  Oxygenics shower heads use a patented technology that actually increases the pressure of your shower while cutting your water usage by an average of 0.75 gallons per minute.  If we go back to the average family of 4, that’s 30 gallons a day, 10,950 gallons a year.  Plus as an added bonus, an average of 70% of the water used in the shower is heated, so that family of 4 will be heating 7,665 gallons less per year.

That’s 10,950 gallons not being pumped to that house, 10,950 gallons not being processed at the water treatment plant, 10,950 gallons not being pulled from our lakes, rivers, and wells.  That’s for one family of 4.  Imagine the impact we could have if everyone used a water conserving shower head.  A great place to start is here.