Great Green Idea: Green Furnishing: Stop the Flow and Reduce Your Use of Unnecessary Water While Showering!

Stop the Flow and Reduce Your Use of Unnecessary Water While Showering!

Showers are one of the areas of our life where we not only use the most water, but we use it unnecessarily. A good deal of the water used during the average shower goes right down the drain without ever being used in the process of cleaning your body. While long, relaxing, super hot showers are certainly nice, they are a huge waste of our planet's most precious resource, the stuff that makes life possible - water.

To be environmentally friendly and try to take your water usage into account and do something to reduce it, does not mean giving up showers. Nobody would want to do that, and certainly nobody would want to be around someone who did! But there are ways to reduce your water usage without cutting showers, and likely friends and family as a result, out of your life.

Right down at your local hardware store is a little gadget that costs less than $20 but has the power to dramatically reduce the amount of water you use each time you shower. These are called low flow switch off showerheads. These inexpensive, nifty little gadgets have the ability to reduce your water consumption significantly, without your having to give up, you know, bathing.

Most conventional shower heads release as much as 5-10 gallons of water per minute. Just imagine that for a 20 minute shower, you could be using as much as 200 gallons of water. 200 gallons! That is a LOT of water for a simple shower! Low flow showerheads reduce this flow to around 2.5 gallons of water per minute which is a significant reduction. But their utility does not stop there.

The real genius behind these shower heads is the on/off functionality. Why waste water when you are shampooing your hair or soaping up your body? With these inexpensive low flow showerheads, you don't have to. With the simple flick of a button or switch, the water flow is staunched and turned off. This allows you to soap up, or do whatever it is that you were going to do, and then turn the water back on when needed - without having to wait for it to warm up again.

You don't have to go basic with your low flow showerhead either. While a standard model, such as the one described above works perfectly well for most people, it is lacking in features. It has one flow speed and an on/off switch. In the modern area, we have gotten used to having all sorts of amenities in the shower like multiple shower heads to bath us with water from all directions, to ones that have "massage" functions. If you want to go green, but you still want these little extras, while it will cost a little more, these types of features are available on more advanced and sophisticated low flow shower heads.

We might not often think about the amount of water wasted each and every time we take a shower, but we should. This is an area of our life where we waste most and thus, it is an area that should be one of the first targeted when going green. You can install a low flow showerhead with an on/off switch with ease and very little cost. This simple, but highly effective little tool will save water and save you money. This is a win-win situation for you and the planet, what's not to love about that?