ShowerCap app fights drought at home

A discussion with his sister about how to save water has inspired a UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences researcher to come up with a way for people to track and limit their shower times.

Showers, landscape irrigation and toilet flushing are tops in home water use.

The average shower lasts a little more than 8.2 minutes and uses 17.2 gallons of water.

Enter the ShowerCap app.

When he’s not developing software and databases for tracking fish for UC Davis, Nick Santos manages the Environmental Consumer, a non-profit group that provides simple tools for consumers to do something good for the environment.

The ShowerCap is a free web-based application, available for use on smartphones, tablets, and desktops.

It features a timer which tracks shower lengths, and a chart to measure progress and reach goals.

Santos says ShowerCap can help cut shower times in half, saving a gallon per minute, or potentially four gallons of water a day.

“The least it will do is get people focused on the drought, and even if they don’t use the app all the time, it might change their behavior a bit,” says Santos.

Santos built the app at a Sacramento hackathon during a very un-drought like rainy weekend in February.

He’s in the process of tweaking the design, and hopes ShowerCap can eventually be used for overall water use strategy and planning for households.

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