Here's your chore this weekend: head to a hardware store a buy a new shower head.
Your shower head at home, if it is old, probably uses about 3.5 gallons of water per minute. If it is a newer one, it might only use 2.5 gallons per minute.
Let's assume yours is a newer one. If three ten minute showers are taken each day, 75 gallons of water are used.
A newer high efficiency model uses only 1.5 gallons per minute, meaning that the same thirty minutes of showering would use just 45 gallons of water.
Over one year, that saves almost 11,000 gallons water, which adds up to $100 per year in energy savings -- that is not counting the reduction in your water bill!
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Bricor high-efficiency shower head costs about $65, so you make your money back in less than eight months.
Metromode reader Matt Grocoff, who is sustainably renovating his Ann Arbor home, crunched these numbers. He is quick to point out that these new efficient shower heads are not the "low flow" shower heads of the environmental movement 1.0, and goes so far as to call them "luxurious." Hilton is even marketing them in hotel rooms as upgrades.
Source: Matt GrocoffWriter: Kelli B. Kavanaugh
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