Hey everyone, I am Eric Rochow and this is Real World Green. A little bit different location here today. Today we are going to talk about how to save water in your shower of all places and I know that the shower is a pretty secret thing for a lot of people but showers can also waste a lot of water and also waste a lot of heat and I didn't really think about that till I started doing some research on this.
In newer homes where you have already installed a 2.5 gallon per minute shower head. If you live in an older home or if you are living in a home that's been worked on, they might have switch out a low flow shower head. This is not making sense, I will start again.
Alright, so anyway, low flow shower heads. Some of them look like this. Some of them look a little fancier but what low flow means is that they put out a maximum of 2.5 gallons per minute and at this day and age they are really quite amazing. I mean if you go in a new hotel and you take a shower, that has a low flow shower head in it and you probably don't even know it. Your home, if it's a newer home, probably has low flow shower heads in it too. There is a lot of -- to say low flow shower heads.
So you are asking, how do I know if I have a low flow shower head or not? Well, it might very likely say on the shower head itself, 2.5 gpm, it might say it along the edge here. There might be a sticker on it. It might not even say it. If you are not sure and it doesn't said there, there is a neat way to test whether you have one or not. Go get yourself a one gallon milk container, cut the top open a little bit because you are probably going to do that, pick up the shower head and -- but jam it up on the shower head and then turn the shower head on full blast and then if that gallon milk jug container fills up within less than 20 seconds, you do not have a low flow shower head. Prettty simple.
So if you don't have a low flow shower head, they are really easy to install. Really all you need is a crescent wrench or a pair of those kind of lock-jaw pliers and you can replace these really simply. You go to your hardware store, buy this and buy some Teflon tape. If you remove the old shower head, make sure you have got the valves turned off obviously. Remove the old shower head, clean up the threads, put some Teflon tape on the threads of the pipe coming out of the wall. Put the Teflon tape on clockwise by the way, just wrap it three, four times around there and then take your new shower head and spin it right on and it's really quite simple. You just cinch it down, don't make it too tight. If you have nice chrome fittings you can wrap terrycloth around here or you can wrap it some heavy duty electrical tape so that the wrench doesn't make any mar marks on here, mar marks.
Anyway. So it's really quite simple, you can do that. When you put in a low flow shower head, obviously the big saving is you are saving water. But I didn't realize is you are also saving in heat, because you are using less water, you are using less hot water and I didn't think of it. But your hot water heater has to heat the water that you are going to take a shower with. By using a low flow shower head, your hot water heater has to generate less hot water.
So you are saving water and you are saving in energy as well. So it's a double good thing. The new shower heads, these things are really quite amazing. The first once that came out they didn't seem to work very well. They have got the technology now that this feels like six or eight gallons a minute. The trick is, is that they force it out of these tiny little holes and they aerate it with air. Thank you, they aerate it with air and so it's just, it's kind of an amazing feel. I especially like this little kind of cone one here, but that's just a personal shower preference.
There is an added feature on this specific low flow shower head that I like, it's an on-off valve right here. So you can go in the shower, you can let yourself down and then you just go -- and you turn off the water and then you soap yourself up and then when you are ready to rinse off, you turn the water back on again and you are saving even more hot water this way. It's just kind of neat, off on, off on.
Alright, so there you go. Another really simple way that you can reduce your impact on the earth with your low flow shower head and if you want to take that extra step and get the one with a little on off valve which I really like. Send us e-mails, tell us what you think, eric@realworldgreen.com and visit our website www.realworldgreen.com and tell us what you think. If you happen to work for the Wall Street Journal or The New York Times or another newspaper, maybe you want to write an article about us, that would be nice. And I don't know if you were around in the 70s with the first Earth Day t-shirts but I remember the Save Water, Shower with a Friend T-Shirt and I just kind of have a little unique spin on that, that we are going to do right now.
Thank you for watching. Remember to send us e-mails, tell your friends and shower with your friends. Ready guys, I got it. Come on.
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