How much does one single shower cost you? It MUST be a fraction of your utilities so certainly not more than $10 each. Let me walk you though the calculations and estimate how much each shower really costs you so you can decide if showering at work or gym is a good idea for the inconvenience it causes.
How’s it going everybody this is beat the bush today i’m gonna talk about how much it costs to take one shower awhile ago i had a conversation with a friend where he actually goes to work to take a shower instead of taking at at home what he does is this and i’ve heard this multiple times not just that particular person is that they may wake up in the morning not take
A shower instead go to work perhaps he might do a workout or something and then they take a shower at work the reasoning for this is simple and you can probably guess that if you shower at work you’re gonna use their hot water instead you’re gonna use their water instead now there’s a question if you’re allowed to do this or not you’re allowed to use the facilities
But are you allowed to use every single day are you allowed to use a shower if you don’t work out these are questions that you could ask your human resources of your company but i’m gonna leave that up to you guys to see if that you should be doing this or not what i want to do today instead is calculate the cost savings if you shower at work instead of showering
At home all i want to know is does it make that much of a difference obviously it’s not gonna be in like the $100 range every single month before doing this calculation i was thinking maybe it’s only like a dollar a month or something or it might be up to ten or fifteen dollars i really did not know there’s a huge range to this and this is why i want to make this
Calculation now in order to do this calculation i made various assumptions and you kind of have to depending on where you are because the temperature that your water heater needs to heat your water will vary it needs to heat it from a certain temperature up to a certain temperature so over here you’ll see a typical water temperature across different months for
Somewhere in the bay area so in month one you see that typical water temperature is 51 degrees fahrenheit and then in february 54 and then all the way up to december is of 54 again in the summer months you can see that the water gets a little bit warmer 58 59 60 degrees fahrenheit now here’s a spreadsheet that i developed i just kind of plugged all this in and did
My own calculations here now if you guys are interested in this spreadsheet and kind of plugging in your own numbers i do offer the source file for my patreon members if you’re interested in checking that out any level would do even if you contribute $1 you can have access to all the spreadsheets i’ve ever shared in the past check out my patreon page at the end
Of this video or down in the video description below now over here the first line is tap water temperature now i just took the average of the 12 months because i don’t want to figure it out for every single month this will let you know that it actually costs you more to take a shower in the winter months because your water heater needs to will heat up your water
More in order to reach that same temperature the water heater output temperature needs to be about 108 degrees fahrenheit and then there’s gonna be some heat loss i assume about 3 degrees fahrenheit heat loss from your water heater all the way to the exit of your showerhead the typical loss is anywhere from 2 to 4 degrees fahrenheit now you realize that when you
Take a shower you’re actually mixing hot water and cold water together back to a lower temperature so in essence you can kind of think of the water as being heated to that temperature what’s really happening is that your water heater is heating it up something much higher than that and then by the time it gets to your shower it mixes the hot water and cold water
But the heating is the same you can do the calculation just by assuming you heat all of that water to 105 degrees so the difference is gonna be between 180 degrees and 55.8 so right here in difference in temperature is 52 point 2 degrees fahrenheit now your water heater is gonna have some heat loss just for sitting there now we’re not gonna count this in because
We’re gonna talk about the delta between you taking a shower at work versus you taking it at home so you still need to turn on your hot water heater it’s still gonna lose some heat over time the shower head water rate now this matters a lot because i have an efficient one that’s 1.5 gallon a minute and a not so efficient one day that’s two and a half gallons per
Minute this is close to twice the amount here so i’m just gonna go with 1.5 gallon per minute over here shower time is about 15 minutes i do about 20 minutes and you know some people even do thirty minutes and some people go really crazy and do like one-hour showers so you just multiply these two together and you get 22 and a half gallons of water used now you got
To convert this gallons of water into how many pounds that water weighs so you got to multiply it by 8.3 three pounds this is how many pounds each gallon of water weighs and you get one hundred eighty seven point four pounds so this number it’s in itself is kind of interesting because 187 pounds of water is pretty heavy it’s like one person’s weight through the
Course of your showering you’re actually pouring all this weight onto yourself of course it doesn’t feel like that much unless you’re like trying to carry all of this all at once now then we’re gonna go to natural cast calculations one btu is the amount of energy it takes to heat one pound of water up one degrees fahrenheit so you do 187 pounds times fifty two point
Two degrees fahrenheit which is the amount of degrees that we need to heat up this water from fifty five point eight degrees fahrenheit all the way up to one hundred and eight degrees fahrenheit so the btu used for your total shower of 15 minutes is about ten thousand i put nine thousand seven hundred seventy seven here but we’re just going around to ten thousand or
So cost per 100 thousand btus which is one therm which is if you look in your natural gas bill they always charge you in therms ego okay one therm is how much i look on my bill it’s about a dollar fifty per therm so about one-tenth of that is fifteen cents so it costs fifteen cents in order to keep that water up to your shower temperature level now it’s not just a
Heating class here you also used water water is calculated by one ccf which is 100 cubic feet which is equals to 748 gallons so i look on my water bill and every 748 gallons cost me four dollars and five cents i noticed that the service fee is quite high so even if you use zero water it’s gonna cost me personally about twenty five dollars every single month so if i
Absolutely don’t use any water i still have to pay this $25.00 i don’t factor this in i’m calculating based on if you do this change this small change where you go okay i’m gonna feel a little bit dirty and i’m gonna go into work and take a shower and i know people that does this this is kind of like a paradigm shift it’s kind of like well should you do this first
Or you do this second you just kind of shift your resources around and once you get used to it i do think it is possible if your employer allows this now we go back and calculate the cost per gallon of water which is half a penny for every single gallon so when you turn on the faucet and you fill up one gallon of water that’s actually costing you half a penny now
Half a penny is not all that much is like one flush at the toilet is half a penny you can do this all day long do this a hundred times and it will still only cost you about fifty cents so water you know in a way is kind of cheap so we use about twenty-two and a half gallons of water for the shower the total costs of that is twelve cents now you can imagine if you
Take twice as long in the shower it’s gonna cost you twenty four cents for water instead now we add up the heating cost of that water which is fourteen point seven cents and then the cost of the water itself which is twelve point two cents now we come to a grand total of 27 cents for the cost of the shower we multiply this by 20 which is the number of showers you
Would be taking if you go to work every single weekday and take your shower assuming you don’t go in on weekends just to take a shower the grand total per month is five dollars and 37 cents so let’s think about this here five dollars and 37 cents is this worth it to do i’m not going to make any judgment if you should or should not do this i’m merely estimating
The costs for you guys so you guys can decide on your own if you did this change for a whole year assuming you have two weeks of a vacation and you go to work 250 days a year this will essentially save you sixty seven dollars and twelve cents in water and natural gas costs now sixty seven dollars you have to think is this worth it for you for this inconvenience
It’s sort of is like an inconvenience because you got a drive you got to get on your commute and you got to feel like you know not quite clean on your way to work and somehow you got a like go and use their facilities and you also need to pack up you know your showering gear and stuff you gotta you know always sort of have this uncomfortable feeling of you know
Using a shower that’s not really yours some people might go oh my gosh this is crazy penny-pinching sixty seven dollars i would rather just pay this and just you know take my showers at home again i’m not gonna be the judge of this because i know there’s gonna be a certain camp of people that goes oh my gosh if you do this you can save sixty-seven dollars i’m in
And then there’s also gonna be another camp of people that goes oh my gosh i can’t believe you’re making a video about this penny-pinching this and you know just saving only sixty seven dollars a year i rather just pay all of this with that said this satisfied my personal curiosity that every single shower i take cost about 25 cents in retrospect when i was in
Japan they charged me anywhere from $2 to $5 for a single shower so they are making a little bit of profit there i hope you guys enjoyed this back of the envelope analysis of how much it costs to take a shower if you’re interested in supporting this channel check out my audible link down in the video description below where you can get a free audio book if you
Don’t like this audiobook you can cancel it before the subscription expires and you can still keep this audiobook for free and for life i also have a patreon over here where you can contribute as little as $1 a month and you can still get access to all of the spreadsheet i’ve used in the past and as always don’t forget to subscribe to my channel and click that
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Transcribed from video
How Much Does It Cost to Shower By BeatTheBush
