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One Simple Way to Conserve Water at Home: Take a Navy Shower!

There are many great and pleasantly simple ways to conserve water usage at home. Want to save an extra 50+ gallons of water each and every day? Here’s one way you may not have considered before: take a navy shower! No, you don’t need to shout “yes, drill sergeant” or drop and do fifty push-ups at any point in this process. It’s actually one of the better ideas to come out of the military

A navy shower is a method of showering that originated on ships at sea, where freshwater supplies were frequently in short supply. The idea is quite simple: Turn on the water and rinse, turn off the water and scrub down with soap, and then turn on the water once again to clean off the soap. Really, that’s it.

Simple Home Water Conservation

Instead of having the water run for the entire duration of the shower (which is ultimately very wasteful – you’ll be no cleaner for it, believe it or not!), the shower is on for a mere two to three minutes.

Need more convincing? Amazingly, the average 10 minute shower requires 60 gallons of water. That’s 240 gallons of water for a family of four, just to shower once each day! A navy shower, however, can use as little as 3 gallons! To make the argument even more convincing, this resourceful individual did the math to calculate how much money that simple change would save you.

Combined with a low flow showerhead, you’ll be on your way towards greater water conservation at home!

Image credit: flickr via Squiggle

2 comments
  1. Edward Antrobus

    We did this in the scouts, also. At a lot of camp grounds, the showers had pull chains. The shower was only on while you were pulling on the chain.

    What about the issue that my tankless water-heater, which supposedly saves energy by not needing to keep a tank of water hot on standby, takes about 5 minutes to warm up before I won’t risk hypothermia by getting under the water?

    1. JanS

      You want it realy Navi-like? Keep the shower cold and this will make sure that you don’t waste water. I remember my travelling in Nepal. A hot shower was a bless, but hey: How many gallons did I save there?

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