What Is a Shower Timer?
A shower timer is a simple countdown that helps you keep showers short and see the real impact of the water running over your head. This one does more than count: it visualises the water flowing from the shower head into a measuring jug, and it tracks your water usage and cost live. Set how long you want to shower, choose your flow rate and water price, and the jug fills as the litres add up. When you hit your target the alarm sounds and the timer keeps counting up in red so you know the water is still running.
See How Much Water Your Shower Uses
Most people have no idea how much water a shower actually uses. It comes down to two numbers: your flow rate and how long you stand under it. Water usage is simply flow rate multiplied by time. A standard shower head runs at about 9 litres per minute (roughly 2.5 gallons per minute), so a 10 minute shower pours out around 90 litres, or about 24 gallons. Low-flow heads cut that to 6 litres per minute or less. As this timer runs it multiplies your flow rate by the elapsed minutes and shows the running total, so you can watch exactly how quickly a long shower drains the tank.
What a Shower Costs You
The cost of a shower is the water used times the price you pay per unit. In many places water plus sewer charges come to roughly $0.004 per litre, or about $0.015 per gallon, though your bill may differ. Enter your own rate and the timer recalculates the cost as you go. Keep in mind this is only the cost of the water itself. Heating that water adds a second, often larger cost: a hot shower can use more energy in water heating than the water is worth, so a shorter shower saves on both the water bill and the energy bill at the same time.
How Long Should a Shower Be?
Water-saving guidance points to a 4 minute shower as a good target, and many utilities promote the 4 to 5 minute range. That is long enough to get clean without letting litres pour down the drain. The famous "Navy shower" goes even further: wet down, turn the water off while you soap up, then rinse, using as little as a minute or two of actual flow. Use the Navy 4 min preset as a stretch goal and the Average 5 min preset as a realistic everyday target. Cutting a typical 8 minute shower down to 4 minutes roughly halves your water usage every single day.
Tips to Save Water in the Shower
- Aim for a 4 minute shower and let the timer keep you honest
- Fit a low-flow shower head to cut your flow rate and litres without losing pressure
- Turn the water off while lathering or shampooing, Navy-shower style
- Do not use the shower to warm up or wake up — that is pure water usage with no purpose
- Check your flow rate by timing how long the shower takes to fill a bucket of known size
- Colder, shorter showers save water and the energy used to heat it, so you save twice