Shower Water Usage Calculator for the UAE

A normal shower head puts out around nine litres a minute. An eight minute shower is about seventy litres.

Four people doing that once a day is nearly three hundred litres, every day, from one activity.

Nothing else indoors comes close. A toilet flush is six litres. A washing machine load is about sixty and happens a few times a week. Kitchen taps and cleaning are a steady trickle.

That is why shower length is the one indoor habit worth paying attention to. Two minutes off each shower, for a family of four, is a large number over a month.

A different head does the same job without anybody changing their behaviour. Going from a fifteen litre rain head to a nine litre head cuts the use by nearly half.

Water in the UAE is charged for, but the bigger cost of a shower is usually the electricity that heated it.

Heating water takes a lot of energy. Raising the temperature of a hundred litres by twenty five degrees takes around three kilowatt hours, which is more than an air conditioner uses in an hour.

So the shower has two costs attached, and the heating one is normally larger.

This is also why the season matters so much here. In winter the mains water is genuinely cold and the heater does real work. In summer the water sitting in a roof tank is already warm, sometimes uncomfortably so, and the heater barely runs.

Many households here switch the water heater off entirely for the hottest months and notice nothing except the bill.

In most countries the complaint is that the shower is not hot enough. Here, for several months, it is the opposite.

Water sitting in a tank on a roof in full sun gets hot on its own. By the afternoon the cold tap can run genuinely hot, and a cold shower is not available at all.

A few practical things follow. Switching the water heater off in summer saves electricity and changes nothing about your shower.

Insulating or shading the roof tank helps, and it also keeps the water fresher.

And running the cold line for a moment before getting in is worth doing, because the water that has been sitting in the pipe on a hot roof is the hottest of all.

None of this is a fault. It is what a tank in this climate does, and it is the reason the hot share option in the tool has a summer setting.

In order of what saves the most for the least effort.

A shower that feels weak is not always using less water, and one that feels strong is not always using more.

How a shower feels comes from pressure and from the design of the head. A good low flow head uses fine jets and air to make nine litres feel like fifteen.

A cheap head with large holes and low pressure feels weak and can still be using plenty.

So if your shower feels poor, check the pressure before replacing anything. A blocked head, a clogged filter or a partly closed valve are all common and all cheap.

And if two showers cannot run at once, that is not pressure at all. That is the pipe feeding them, and no shower head will change it.