Can a £12 shower gadget save you £180 a year?

(Copyright: REX)

It’s Water Saving Week, so I’ve been trying to reduce the amount of water I use in our home.

After all, wasted water doesn’t just add to water bills for households on a meter; if the wasted water is heated first then it can mean high energy bills too.

So when I heard about the Eco Shower Drop, a universal shower meter that claims it can save the average family more than £180 a year in water and energy costs, I was keen to give it a go.

In my house we have a power shower and I am guilty of lazing under the running water for much longer than basic hygiene demands. In the past I tried to get this under control by timing my showers and limiting them to seven minutes,  but I quickly gave that up as my timer inevitably went off just as I put conditioner in my hair – and then annoyed me by bleeping for the rest of my shower.

Could a universal shower meter put me on track to saving £180 a year?

That is what the manufacturers claim. Because the Eco Showerdrop can be calibrated to each specific shower, it can tell you exactly when you are approaching the 35 litre limit, which is the suggested maximum shower water usage recommended by Waterwise UK.

If a family of four used the device religiously for every shower then the device’s designers claim this could save more than £180 a year in energy and water costs.

How do you use it?

This gadget was easy to install (and when I say ‘install’, I mean ‘stick to the wall of my shower’) and easy to program. You simply take the litre-sized bag and catch water in it while the device times how long that takes. By pressing a button to tell the gadget when the bag is full you have calibrated it to work out how long it will take you to use 35 litres.

Inside the blue, plastic drop shape is a little figure on a screen; making the whole thing look a bit like a Tamagotchi. When you press the on button, drops begin falling on the Tamagotchi man’s head and he slowly fills up to show you how long you have before you reach the limit.

Once the limit is reached, a little alarm goes off to tell you it’s time to get out. Ultimately, this is a device that relies on guilt. It guilt-trips you into cutting your shower time short but it does at least gives you plenty of warning so you can time your ablutions accordingly.

The showerdrop sticks to your bathroom wall

Does it work?

The gadget is reasonably cheap and very, very easy to use. However, it relies on householders actually agreeing to use it and remembering to switch it on every time they get in the shower.

Unfortunately, if you have a power shower like us then you’ll be tempted to ignore it. In our shower the little man fills up in about three and a half minutes, which is a very short shower indeed, especially if you’re trying to wash your hair. A relaxing shower turns into a frantic wash, although it is hardly the fault of the gadget that our shower fires out more water in a minute than Niagara Falls.
 
Also, many of the reviews warn that the device stops working if it gets wet, so it’s a good idea to stick it somewhere out of the way of the water stream.

Of course, the real question is – can it honestly save you £180 a year? The initial research was conducted back in 2008 by Waterwise and the Energy Saving Trust, which showed that by limiting each daily shower to 35 litres of water a family of four could save more than £180 a year on water and energy bills. The cost of both water and energy have risen since that study, so is it possible the potential savings are even greater now?

I rang Jacob Tompkins, a civil engineer and the managing director of Waterwise to ask. He said that some gadgets reduce water use while others provide nudges for behavioural change. The Eco Showerdrop is useful, bit it can only alert families to the water they are using – not force them to use less.

“We recommend a four or five-minute shower, which would be about 35 litres,” he explained. “I’d say that [a family of four] could save up to £180 overall by sticking to that.”

So yes, that savings figure is achievable if your family currently use far more than that to shower and if they can be persuaded to limit that in the future.

Will I keep using it?

My husband outright refuses to use the Eco Showerdrop. He says that his weekday mornings are frantic enough as it is and that he won’t add to the pressure with a ‘stupid plastic guilt-timer’.

I’m more willing to give it a try but I’ve taken to using the shower over the bath, which only trickles and so lets me enjoy a good seven minute shower before the Eco Showerdrop alarm goes off. At the moment our children are too small for showers, but I think that older children might get a kick out of ‘racing’ the little man.

Right now this gadget won’t save me £180 a year, but I think it could in the future. And the potential savings for a family who stick to it could be even greater.

Do you limit your family’s shower time? Has it cut your bills? Have your say using the comments below.