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So it's not a negligible amount of money, but it costs less than my combined streaming services. Cutting it by 20% would allow me to afford... another streaming service? A couple of days' groceries?Your math comes out similar to what I remember from the utility bill (which I currently don't have handy, so I won't provide exact calculation). It's not life-changing, but it's not nothing. A couple days of groceries worth of money we could use for arbitrary discretionary spending, at a cost of... pretty much nothing, I don't consider this habit to take noticeable effort over keeping the shower running. And with several more such "little to no effort saves you a Netflix subscription" habits, this adds up. You can probably ignore $100-$150 / month saved off utility bills and incidental costs when on a tech-equivalent salary, but many people wouldn't.
(And yes, we mind the opportunity costs too.)
> I know from experience being forced to shower with a mostly-clogged drain for a couple of days there's no way my shower head is filling the tub even over my ankles before the shower is done (5-10 minutes).
That's an interesting data point. I may have exaggerated with "several tubs", though my actual shower, left on for the entire duration and with drain plugged, would fill a tub[0] to the level where, were I to lie down, the water would spill out[1]. We may have different sizes of the tub/showering compartments, and possibly different pressure levels and flow rates. Eyeballing it now, the bathroom faucet gives some 10-12 liters per minute, maybe a bit more; this is cut down to some 8 liters per minute when going through the shower head in default setting.
> And I guess we're just blessed with plentiful water on the US East Coast, because I've lived in several states on this coast for my entire life and I'd never even heard of "Navy Shower" until college, and only then as a reference to... the Navy! Or sometimes we hear about Californians being asked to do so when a drought hits.
I never heard it called this way until 'stavros mentioned it today! For me, it was always known as the "mom asking 'why are you wasting water in the shower?' shower" :). We don't need to do it, it just feels unnecessarily wasteful if we don't (and it makes noticeable difference in the bills for households on median salary or below).
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[0] - The 32' x 60' like here: https://www.thespruce.com/bathtub-sizes-reference-guide-1821..., which is similar to "standard bathtub" of 70x170cm where I live.
[1] - I admit I got confused by my intuition. A "standard bathtub" similar to [0] will hold over 200 liters of water, which is of course way more than the shower head would provide over the duration of my shower. When I wrote about filling bath tubs, I thought intuitively about the volume past which you can't lie down without it spilling out.