How long is your shower – and how much is it costing you?
Key takeaways
- The average Aussie showers for around 7 minutes; assuming you shower daily, that's ~23,000 litres a year.
- Based on average energy and water costs, every minute in the shower costs around 11.4c.
- If every Australian cut their shower by 1 minute each, we'd save billions of litres of water a year.
How long was your last shower?
Thanks, that helps.
Nice - that is the one.
Not quite.
The average Aussie showers for around 7 minutes, according to a range of recent sources. If you're using a water-efficient shower head flowing at around 9 litres a minute, that's roughly 63 litres of water every time you shower. Assuming you shower daily, that's ~23,000 litres a year – enough to fill:
🥤 11,500 2 litre bottles of soft drink
🏊 Half of an average backyard pool
💦 2,300 watering cans to water 23,000 plants
Are you a fan of a long shower?
Relatable. We sometimes do our best thinking under a stream of running water.
But if you could shave 5 minutes off your daily shower, you could save around 16,400 litres of water a year.
Or, if you'd rather think about it in terms of time…
5 minutes a day adds up to more than 30 hours a year. That's enough time to:
- Read roughly 5 or 6 books (300 pages each), assuming around 5½-6 hours of reading per book.
- Watch 15-20 movies at the cinema
- Learn the basics of a new language
- Walk more than 150km at a leisurely pace
And then there's the money
Longer showers use more water and, because that water has to be heated, more energy. Our recent calculations put a 10-minute shower at around $1.14, which is around 11.4c per litre. These calcs are based on a 9L/min showerhead, $5/kL water and 33c/kWh electricity.
So, cut that shower to 5 minutes, and you could roughly halve the cost.
There's a reason water authorities keep banging on about the 4-minute shower, too. Queensland Government advice says cutting 2 minutes from your shower can save up to two buckets of water, while Water Corporation says cutting just 1 minute from every shower in WA would save 12 billion litres of water a year.
Of course, sometimes a long shower is exactly what you need. Hair washing, shaving, existential crises… they all take time.
But before you turn the tap on tomorrow morning, ask yourself:
What could I do with 5 extra minutes a day?
Sources
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