The shower police are working;

In American bathrooms they’re lurking;

The government limit

is ten quarts a minute

but scofflaws are soaking and smirking.

According to the United Nations, global warming and water shortages are two of the most serious problems facing the world today. As I pointed out in the chapter on Your Water Footprint in The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Self-Sufficient Living, “It’s a huge problem and a huge topic, and every informed person, self-sufficient or not, should know a few of the facts.” But the problem is even bigger and more complicated than I realized. Never mind irrigation, flush toilets, greywater and rain gardens: I could have devoted an entire chapter just to showers.

(True, neither showers — nor the book — have much to do with self-sufficiency, but they’re both very concerned with sustainability.)

For most Americans, a daily hot shower is a God-given right, and for many it’s probably more important than things like free speech or the right to bear arms. However, while “showers” in the form of servants pouring buckets of water on the master predate the ancient Greeks — who had actual plumbed showers — they were quite rare until recently. I remember being impressed by the shower in the Glensheen Mansion in Duluth, Minnesota — in the master’s bathroom. We were told it wasn’t proper for ladies to shower when that house was built in 1905-08.

Our house didn’t have a shower even in the 1940s. Not that it mattered much, because we didn’t have hot water, either. We did have a bathtub, and my mother heated water in a teakettle on the stove. That was Saturday night only, unless somebody got real dirty in-between.

Fast-forward to 2010: The federal government is cracking down on showerheads that defy regulations that have been on the books since 1992. That law says a showerhead can deliver no more than 2.5 gallons of water per minute. The main problem seems to be that, treating a luxurious shower as a birthright, some people want much more. One (now discontinued) showerhead delivered a whopping 12 gallons a minute. Some others are also outta sight. The Raindance has a 24-inch spray face, 358 channels, and a price tag of $5,457. More commonly, upscale bathrooms now have multiple showerheads.

Tree-huggers are obviously moved by the Dept. of Energy claim that each multi-head shower fixture uses an extra 40 to 80 thermal units per year, equal to 50 gallons of gasoline or one barrel of oil. And obviously, all that water has an impact on aquifers, and places additional strains on sewage treatment plants. So yes, limiting the water used in showers is a good idea in terms of national water and energy conservation.

But as usual, there are a zillion other considerations to complicate the matter. There is the question of government intrusion into our bathrooms, of course (just as with low-flow toilets in 1994). Even if we concede that the government should play a role, what rate of water flow is “reasonable,” how long should a shower be — and is a daily douse necessary, or even desirable? What about people who shower once a week — or 2-3 times a day? Should they be treated differently?

Frequent showers interest me in light of my early experience with the traditional Saturday Night Bath. But even when a shower became available, it was seldom used on a daily basis. Most people today would be amazed at what you can do with a few cups of water and a sponge bath.

The 1969 book, Life on Man, by microbiologist Theodor Rosebury, fascinated me with descriptions of the mind-boggling numbers of normal microbial fauna that inhabit the healthy human body (trillions, of more than 200 species). Even more fascinating was the claim that they’re back again within minutes after a bath or shower, and that some are actually necessary for our health.

In modern industrial society showering is basically for social and aesthetic reasons. You don’t need a daily shower to stay healthy. In fact, just the opposite might be true. Researchers at the University of Colorado found that pathogens that occur naturally in low numbers in municipal water can accumulate in high concentrations inside showerheads. In other words, taking a shower can make you sick. (The main pathogen is Mycobacterium avium, which is also responsible for a condition dubbed Hot Tub Lung.)

A typical shower is said to use four gallons per minute, meaning a five-minute shower takes 20 gallons of water (plus the energy to pump and heat it). Restricted-flow showerheads use 2.5 gallons a minute at 80 psi, although most homes have pressure closer to 50. I just checked, and our shower delivers just over one gallon a minute, at about 45 psi. That makes it tough to feel sorry for the bloke who uses 12 times as much.

The next time you’re in the shower remember those people whose daily water ration for everything — drinking, cooking, sanitation — is a mere one gallon a day.

And that virtual water, the water footprint that we talk about in CIG to Self-Sufficient Living? For Americans, that figure is 1,189.3 gallons per person per day, more than three times the Chinese average.

Maybe we need shower police only because too many people just don’t have enough common sense. — Jd Belanger