EXPERIMENT 6:

SHOULD YOU SHOWER OR TAKE A BATH?

THINGS YOU NEED: Your bathtub. A yardstick. A bar of soap (optional).

Here’s a surprising fact: If people who took baths took showers instead, we’d save a lot of energy. This experiment demonstrates what we mean.

Start by taking a bath.Fill your bathtub with water (adjusted to the temperature you like best) as usual, but before you step in, use your yardstick to measure the depth of water in the tub.

Next, take a shower (better wait till you really need one!). Before you begin, though, do something unusual: close the bathtub drain so that the shower water will collect in the tub. When you are finished (take your time!), measure the depth of water that has collected. Compare this reading with the bath water depth.

You will find that your shower used substantially less water . . .probably less than half as much! A lot of this water is hot water.

As a rule of thumb, figure that it takes an ounce of oil (or a cubic foot of gas, or ¼-kilowatt-hour of electricity) to heat a gallon of water. So you can see that showering saves lots of energy.