Can't stop, sorry. The shower is my final refuge and if I start being conscientious about water usage there, I will end up breaking down in a denny's bathroom at 2am or something.
I have to pay zero attention to water conservation. Hell, when it rains a lot I have to let some faucets run. Just pumping water from one side of the house to the other. Otherwise the side with the well can get moisture in the basement
Using California as an example, agriculture consumes 4x the water of everything else combined - business + industry + parks + homes.
Austerity at homes is generally more of a show than anything else. You can read about the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, but it looks like the legislation isn't mandated to be implemented until the 2040s.
Yes I let it run. Because honestly, I don't care. People will try make you feel guilty over using water while continuing to make excuses to drive everywhere and why they really need an electric car to "save the planet". Oh and please recycle while the city that collects the recycling sends it to the dump because this industry is not profitable. And use less water because giant tech companies are going to need it in order to cool and power some more AI servers.
I never owned a car and have driven only once in 40 years. But I know that whatever I do individually to reduce the amount of pollution in the air, it is absolutely useless and pointless. The army or the police will annihilate a lifetime of individual efforts in one day, or even a few hours. I could get a car right now and 90% of people would probably tell me I did the right thing, as a car is sooo useful. No problem as long as it's electric!
I mean yeah, but also if everyone thought like you we'd definitely not make a difference, so there's two sides. It's the classic "one vote won't matter" argument.
But I hear you. I do the same. I shower for 10 minutes every 2-3 days (I don't get sweaty easily or smell, and live in a semi-dry climate), and when I shower I don't use a very high temperature either. So yeah. The water hits me as I soap up, too, so it's not like it's falling directly from head to drain either.
I do try to be aware of my water supply. If I'm in a place where water is limited by default, like having a well, or when in a Caribbean country, I'll be careful as I know others will depend on that source in the very near future. But I live in Canada and from my immediate point of view, the St-Lawrence and the Great Lakes are not going to be dry soon. The only scarcity here is the energy required to pump the water (also provided by water), and its treatment.
And I do understand that our little collective efforts do add up. However, the issues are systemic. Only in a single region of my province (a region!), around 18 corporations and businesses are using more than 75 000 litres a day. We know just because they have to report it past that point. It adds up to billions of litres in a year. For a single region. The provincial government here also allows corporations to just pump the ground water for about $35 CAD by million of litres.
So again, I know that I could make a difference, if we all really tried. But because of the system, and since the pandemic, I've lost faith in our societies. I don't think most people care. While all hiding in our places a few years ago, while the production slowed down, people have seen the changes in nature, the air clean up... and they said fuck it we just want to go back to how it was before.
Just seeing multiple police cars running their engines 24/7 to stalk and bully some oh so dangerous anti-genocide students made me see that any effort to reduce air pollution on my part will be nullified by the system in general. It doesn't matter if I have car or not, if I recycle plastic while it's produced in the first place, or if I try to save a few litres of water while Nestlé... sigh.
Yeah. My shower has two knobs, so it takes ages to find the right balance for the temperature. It would be annoying to turn both knobs off and then turn them back on and find the right temp again
I live under the sea level. We as a nation control the water. It is our bitch. I can do with water whatever the fuck I please. We won that war a long time ago. Water listens to ME.
Not only do I leave it running, I belittle it in the process.
Yes, I admit I take excessively long showers with the water running the whole time. It makes me feel sane again, able to face the day. More importantly, I live where water is plentiful, so I’ll focus on reducing my carbon footprint in other ways
Growing up we used to live in a house with what I swear was the smallest boiler ever so the hot water would only last for maybe 1-2 showers before needing some time to get hot again. So leaving the water running meant no hot water midway through the shower, or forcing the next person to wait to take a shower.
It's a habit that stuck with me ever since, I've found that I don't really need the water running the whole time anyway.
I turn it off, mostly because my shower is small and i need to completely cover my body in soap before washing it off and if the water is running it'll wash away the soap when i don't want it to.
Also my shower knob stays at the correct temp so I don't need to mess around to get the same temp.
Yes, but only because it doesn't take very long to lather up. It's annoying to have to readjust the water valves to get the temperature right again after having it off for only a minute or two. I feel like I waste more water just letting the shower run on startup to get the cold water to flush out of the hot water pipes.
Saves more water with a recirculation pump on the hot water line. I now literally turn it on, adjust the heat and jump in. It's amazing having instant hot water.
I also used to keep water running and stopped doing that a few months ago. Also reduced my showering time to ~10 minutes… could easily spend 20, sometimes 30 minutes under the shower before.
We've got a shower massage type thing with multiple settings that include a cutoff, but I never use it because we also have this water conditioner can before the shower massage that I'm pretty sure would just explode if it had to hold back our water pressure. Wife likes the conditioner bc she claims it helps with the itchy. I'm sure we could save some water if we used the cutoff, but it's not like we spend hours in there anyway.