Survivor's Journal: Entry 1

My bathroom has no insulation. Turning off the water while I shower is painfully cold. The heat is fleeting. I don't think I can last much longer. I stuck to turning off the water while I soap up for the entire week and I shower every day. Every morning, I got in, got wet, got soapy, and rinsed it off. But I feel like I'm failing. I don't want to jump in the shower when it's cold, especially in the winter without insulation in my bathroom. So I wait. I wait for the water to get warm. I've even measured how long it takes for my shower to warm up. It takes an entire minute for my shower to warm up. Even with a low flow shower head, I'm already wasting 2.5 gallons of water just waiting for the water to warm up (DoE). The infrastructure is old and needs to be rebuilt, so the water heats up in just a few seconds. It feels like I'm down in California, rationing water as much as I can. Even though it's less comfortable, I've been arriving at the mandated indoctrination machine earlier.


By turning the water off while I shower, this action will help reduce water because taking showers because reducing the time the water is on will reduce the amount of water being used. According to the Department of Energy, an average shower averages around 10 gallons of water per shower (DoE, 2014). Turning off the water while I shower will lead to me only using 3 gallons of water per shower. Reducing the amount of water I use to shower leads to more water available in order to mitigate droughts and water shortages (Shapiro, 2018). An alternative to turning off the water when I shower is taking cold showers. By taking cold showers, I do not have to wait for the water to warm up, which wastes water; it takes 1 minute for my own shower to warm up before I get in, which wastes around 2.5 gallons of water (Mooney, 2015). To add on, water heating takes up 17% of a home’s energy use, which consumes more energy than all other household appliances combined; to be more specific, a 5500-watt water heater running for three hours a day uses up to 16.5 kilowatts per hour. (Matulka, 2014). 16.5 kilowatts per hour is equivalent to 0.012 metric tons or a car being driven 30 miles (EPA, 2018). Using the water heater this extensively every day is equivalent to burning 4792 pounds of coal. For 127,586 of them, that usage of electricity is equivalent to burning 611 million pounds of coal (Census, 2018)! An alternate solution to saving water is using a dishwasher because only 3 gallons of water is used when using a dishwasher compared to a staggering 27 gallons when washing by hand (NRDC, 2016). I can save much more water by using a dishwasher rather than washing my dishes by hand, but since my house is old, we do not have a dishwasher to save more water with.

There is no good excuse for me to not to take Navy Showers™. Yeah, I enjoy contemplating life while showering in hot water. Contemplating life is no reason to further this planet's extinction.


To make this behavior achievable for the next 30 days, I need to set a reminder that goes off before I shower; have my phone say, “Remember to turn off the water!” Being me, a very routine man, this is doable. This is a very easy change to make because I’ll just set up a second alarm to the time before I shower. I’ve been arriving at the bus stop earlier which is incentive enough for me; worrying about a late bus is always a drag.