The Ultimate Water-Saving 2-Minute Shower

My recipe for cutting your shower to two minutes while still enjoying it. This will save a lot of water and help you to feel really good about yourself.

Optional extras:

a. To reduce water consumption: shave your head. No need to shampoo, condition or blow-dry. And no bad-hair days!
b. Purchase a shower timer. Approx $10-15 from your local hardware store.

c. Use a Rinnai Infinity instantaneous gas hot water service. This lets you set the hot water temperature – to the degree – which means that you don’t have to mix hot and cold, nor do you heat the water to 60-70deg and then cool it back down again. Or better yet, get solar hot water.

Now, to the recipe:

  1. Set shower timer to 2 minutes.
  2. Start timer.
  3. Start shower.
  4. Wet your body all over.
  5. Turn off shower.
  6. Pause timer.
  7. Use soap or your preferred product to lather and clean all over.
  8. Resume timer.
  9. Turn on shower.
  10. Rinse off.
  11. Enjoy remaining 30-60s of luxuriating hot water. If you choose to grow hair, use this time to rinse out the shampoo, then repeat steps 5-10 for conditioner.
  12. Turn shower off when timer indicates, or earlier for extra brownie points.

Additional water-saving tips:

  • Guys, don’t run the tap while you’re shaving. Just run a little hot water into the basin and use that.
  • Everyone, don’t run the tap while you’re brushing your teeth.

I managed to have a fantastic shower while camping recently using a bucket and about 7-8 litres of rainwater, using essentially the steps above.

Next task: to convince lunatic farmers that inland Australia is not an appropriate place to grow rice! Sheesh…

I’m baaaack!

Back from 5 weeks vacation, camping in National Parks, caravan parks and friend’s backyards, and visiting friends and family. We all had an amazing time that I’ll write about over the coming weeks.

Returning home was surprising – our home of nine years looked eerily unfamiliar even though nothing had changed. I think that there’s a length of time, perhaps about two or three weeks, that is the length of your ‘now’. ‘Recent memory’, if you like. Most vacations aren’t long enough to reach that point, so you don’t get such a disruptive experience when you return to normal life. But I definitely went beyond that point with this holiday.

We drove back into Melbourne late on a Tuesday afternoon, and I was taken aback by the sheer number of people, their pace, and what seemed to me to be the tunnels of vision that they were racing down. The pace out in the countryside is definitely slower and people seem to look around them as they go about their day. Maybe it’s just me and the fact that I’ve been spending weeks marvelling over the size of the country and the sky – we really don’t have much sky in the city – but it was something I noticed immediately.

But it is good to be back in our comfortable beds, good to be able to go to the market and get a proper range of fruit and veg (and at reasonable prices!), and just enjoy all the things that were familiar before we left and are becoming familiar again.

And I’ve got a lot of gardening to do…