ShowerTime

Shaving just a view minutes off your shower time will help reduce your water footprint ...

The Problem

The EPA estimates that the standard shower heads use about 10 liters of water per minute. Delivering, treating, and heating the hot water for your shower is also extremely energy intensive. The longer you run the hot water, the higher your energy use and utility bills rise. According to the EPA, letting your faucet run for five minutes uses about as much energy as letting a 60-watt light bulb run for 22 hours. Using less water will not only lower your energy costs and conserve water, but will keep that water in the environment for natural geological and ecological cycles. Shaving just a view minutes off your shower will help reduce your water footprint.

Just measuring your shower time with a simple timer does not help to monitor your water footprint. It's not the time you linger in the shower that’s bad, it's the time you let the faucet run.

An Idea

A device like the Nordic Thingy:53 just put into the bathroom / near the shower, could be used to monitor your water footprint by detecting the sound of the running faucet using the built-in microphone and AI (based on Edge Impulse). An app on a mobile phone or a smart home integration could retrieve, process and visualize the data to help the user monitor the water consumption.

The Project

See the Hackster project "Smart Shower Timer" for more details.