How Much Energy Does My Shower Take?

Alright, so showers use an immense amount of energy, but everyone knows that... Right? Maybe? Alright so maybe you didn't realize. Here's a calculator you can enter your preferred temperature, flow rate, and duration, and get back how much of various fuels you can use, and at what cost. I couldn't fit my sass in the allotted 250px, so they stick out a little bit. HTML isn't my first love.

Showers per Week:
Minutes per Shower:
Flow Rate:	I Dunno, I've always just considered water a god-granted right. Oh man, I got this old showerhead from the 80's, it really blasts out I'm sorry, I feel really bad, it's just like a dribble I swear
Shower Temperature:	Like, normal? I've never even considered any of this There needs to be steam and pain I said I'm sorry, it's like lukewarm, forgive me
Shower Fuel:	Cubic feet natural gas(via storage tank burner, 65% efficient) Pounds of coal(via electrical grid, 39% efficient) Gallons of oil(via storage tank burner, 55% efficient) Solar, square feet of water heating panels(75% efficient) Solar, square feet of electric panels(17% efficient) Bananas, consumed by one infinitely powerful man on bicycle(25% efficient) (Multiple)Dudes on bicycles, $8/hr Pounds of Feces, AKA natural gas(via storage tank burner, 65% efficient)) Pounds of peanuts(100% efficient because magic) Pounds of kal(100% efficient) Bouncy balls(burnt in a furnace, 50% efficient) 1-lb kittens(burnt in a furnace, 50% efficient) Uranium, in MILLIGRAMS (Via Grid, 45% Efficient)
Watt/hr Per Fuel Unit:
Cost Per Fuel Unit:
Energy Per Shower(KW/Hrs):
Per Year:
Peak Power(KW):
Fuel Per Shower:
Per Year:
Fuel Cost:
Per Year:

So, there it is. Imagine a world with no petroleum, which fuel would you use? Could you afford to keep up your shower habits?

As usual, information was referenced from all over the web, and I forgot to write down the list.

Many prices are thanks to eia.gov and similar non-profit consumer fuel price trackers. Most fuel prices are based between 2012-2014, but I've left the option to enter your own if you have updated information.

Actual Hourly Wage

Something I've always noticed about commuters is none of them take into account the cost and time taken BY THEIR COMMUTING. For example, if you make $10 an hour for eight hours, that's $80 a day, but if you take two hours a day to drive, you're actually making $80 in ten hours, or $8 an hour. Furthermore if you spend $10 a day on a vehicle, fuel, and insurance, you're making $70 in ten hours, which is below minimum wage. You'd be better off walking to a $7.50/hour job, and you wouldn't have to worry about car ownership complications.

I wrote what I consider a rather nifty calculator so you can calculate your actual wage! I play-tested it for about ten minutes, so it may not take every conceivable variable, so if you manage to break it, let me know. It also assumes that your car is used only for commuting, which is reasonable for two-car families, or poor people who don't go Sunday driving.

Days per Week:
Hours per Day:
Hourly Wage:
Vehicle Cost:
Vehicle Life Expectancy(Years):
Vehicle MPG:
Commute Miles per Day:
Commute Time(Minutes per Day):
Gasoline Price:
No car, I ride a:
Other Daily Commute Expenses (Tolls, Fares):
Auto Insurance per Month:
Transit Cost per Day:
Your Actual Hourly Wage:
% of Your Life in Transit:
Cubic Feet of CO2 per Year:

The functions to calculate are all rather simple, and this doesn't include yearly car expenses, such as oil changes, new tires, or other repairs. If you'd like, for accuracy, you can add your best guess for total vehicle maintenance cost (and yearly registration, for that matter) into the entire vehicle cost.

As I'm a strong proprietor of public transit, it's worth mentioning that transit doesn't necessarily save time in the long run, but the time you have is responsibility-free, so you can sleep, eat, work, or Skype your children while you travel, and if you do choose a bus or train, you're anywhere from 16 to 30 times more likely to survive the trip, and as stated here you can achieve the equivalent to hundreds of miles to the gallon.

Happy Commuting!

Efficiency of Vehicles with More Than Basic Fuel Consumption Taken into Consideration

Something that I've noticed about all of this "Fuel Economy" hubub is that almost NOBODY mentions that the ACTUAL efficiency varies drastically depending on how much work you get done with the vehicle. 

For example, if I were to ask you, "Are Hummers as efficient as mopeds?" you would most likely say that they are less so, but taken into consideration that a Hummer can comfortably carry five adults and significant luggage, and to do that on mopeds you would likely need five mopeds, the Hummer uses more fuel, but carries them at greater speed, safety, cargo capacity, so your call, 20 or so MPG on five mopeds, or 16 in a Hummer?

With that in mind, the following table should be easy to understand. Let's define the columns:

Vehicle name, simple enough.

MPG of entire vehicle, Or as regular folks call it, "MPG"

Weight of vehicle, in pounds.

MPG per ton. This is a measure of actual efficiency, for example, a vehicle that weighs one ton and gets 30MPG is equivalent to a two-ton vehicle getting 15MPG. Again, per work done, same efficiency.

Seating capacity. This is a measure of how many people the car can actually carry. This is important to efficiency obviously because given two cars with the same MPG rating, the car that can carry twice the people does twice the work, meaning twice the efficiency, but only if you fill all your seats.

MPG per passenger. One person in a 15MPG car needs a gallon to go 15 miles, two people in the same car need half a gallon each to go the same distance. Same fuel, twice the work, twice the efficiency.

Tons per passenger. This is more a measurement of how efficiently built the vehicle is to accommodate passengers. Ideally, you'd have infinite passengers in a vehicle that weighs nothing, but more realistically, you'd have one fool driving an SUV that weighs three tons.

Vehicle	MPG	Weight (lb)	MPG/Ton	Seats	MPG/Pass	Ton/Pass
"Chainsaw Bicycle"	120	85	4.63	1	120.00	0.04
2014 Honda 50cc Moped	105	209	9.96	1	105.00	0.09
2014 Honda 250cc Motorcycle	80	306	11.11	2	160.00	0.07
1974 Volkswagen Beetle	20	1850	16.79	4	80.00	0.21
2014 Mitsubishi Mirage	44	1973	39.39	5	220.00	0.18
1988 Dodge Colt (my baby)	35	2200	34.94	5	175.00	0.20
2000 Beetle TDI (Diesel)	45	3000	61.25	4	180.00	0.34
2015 Toyota Prius	48	3072	66.90	5	240.00	0.28
1967 Chevy Impala	18	3425	27.97	5	90.00	0.31
2014 Mustang GT	24	3618	39.40	2	48.00	0.82
2014 F-150, V6	16	4154	30.16	2	32.00	0.94
2014 Chevy Suburban	17	5700	43.97	8	136.00	0.32
2014 IC-CE School Bus	8	30000	108.89	77	616.00	0.18
2010 Van Hool 925 (Megabus)	4	62000	112.52	81	324.00	0.35
LZ-129 Hindenburg Airship	0.433	511500	100.47	72	31.17	3.22
2008 Cat 797F	0.300	2175000	296.05	1	0.30	986.84
1981 New York Ferry, Barberi Class	0.05	6670000	151.32	6000	300.00	0.50
CSX Laden Coal Train	0.075	17600000	598.91	4	0.30	1996.37
1912 RMS Titanic (lb/coal)	0.0003	59760000	8.13	3547	1.06	7.64
2006 Sovereign-Class Cruise Ship	0.0250	162965964	1848.53	3577	89.43	20.67
2006 Emma Mearsk	0.0081	376429976	1383.43	400	3.24	426.99

Some vehicle notes:

A "Chainsaw Bicycle" is a term for a two-stroke chainsaw engine attached to a standard bicycle. Miserable emissions, but some of the highest MPGs of any cheap vehicle, thanks to negligible weight.

1988 Dodge Colt was included because it's my car, and also surprisingly efficient, check the figures. Some trims were even made with seven seats.

2000 Beetle TDI is one of very few small diesel cars currently available in the US. Being German, it is, however, enormously heavy.

2010 Van Hool 925 is a standard double-decker long distance transit bus, used by Megabus among others.

The LZ129 is, in fact, an airship. The MPG/Passenger is not bad considering each got a bed, running water, full meals, and music from an on-board grand piano. Furthermore, there were 40 additional crew members accommodated, for an actual MPG/passenger of about 40, so, competitive with a Prius, if a Prius had a bedroom, cooked meals, a grand piano, and the capacity to go 82 MPH for days on end.

Cat 797F is one of the largest dump trucks in the world. Passenger ratings are rubbish because it only seats one operator. If filling the bucket with 4,000 200lb corpses counted, it would get an astonishing 1,200 MPG/"passenger".

CSX Laden Coal Train is based on estimates of four 200-ton locomotives pulling eighty 100-ton laden cars, consuming 800 gallons per hour. Presuming the same weight that's a corpse load of 48,000, for a phenomenal MPG/corpse of over 3,600!

1912 RMS Titanic, as noted, the milage ratings are in pounds of coal, not gallons. By energy, a gallon of gasoline has the energy of 12lb of coal, so for rough gallon estimates, multiply MPG stats by 12.

2006 Emma Mearsk is a large cargo ship which employs one of the most thermodynamically efficient engines currently in operation of the world, and the total efficiency (of the engine alone) exceeds 50% (which is a lot. "Efficient" cars are around 20%). 

More importantly, notice that each person in a Suburban gets 136 MPG, and every person in a megabus gets over 300 MPG. These numbers are ridiculous if you are violently opposed to sharing your hour-a-day commute with EVEN ONE person, and will never be achieved by any level of technology or amount of money, but hundreds of miles to the gallon has been easily and economically available in trains since the 1940's.

The problem is not big cars, or small cars, or inefficient cars, the problem is that we don't comprehend any problem with driving thousands of miles a year, completely alone.

Alternately, with Hitler:

Gasoline Perspective

For starters, let's clarify that 95% of American gasoline is used in "Light Duty" vehicles, meaning passenger or light cargo automobiles. Large commercial trucks, boats, trains, everything for which cost and practicality is taken into account, uses diesel for it's greater efficiency and superior engine durability.

According to eia.gov, the United States used 134.5 billion gallons of gasoline in the year 2013 (This is down by 6% from 142.35 billion in 2007, so pat yourselves on the back)

Compared with the US census of about 310 million people that year, that's 433 gallons for every adult, child, and senior citizen. Have you used your allotted quota? How many other people's gasoline have you taken?

Back to our use as a whole, 134.5 billion gallons a year means 368.5 million gallons a day, 15.35 million gallons an hour, 255,900 gallons a minute, 4,265 gallons a second. Let's visualize 4,265 gallons as a cube:

At this point you may, in fact, begin to realize that the United States uses quite a bit of petroleum, and this doesn't even include what we "need" (aka food, energy, heat, which comes from diesel, coal, and natural gas), this is ONLY in our cars that we use to live further from our work or family, or just for personal enjoyment.

Now for the stupid part:

What if it was all consumed in one, enormous, engine?

Let's start with a typical car engine, and scale it up until it uses all of the gasoline in the US. 

Because I'm familiar with it, I'm going to use the 1.5-liter inline-4 engine from my own car, a 1988 Japanese-built Dodge Colt.

Typically, my car cruising down the highway at 60 MPH will be consuming a gallon of fuel every half hour or so, for a respectable 30 miles to the gallon. My four pistons each measure 75.5mm in diameter, and travel 82mm vertically every time the engine fires.

Remember the cube above? My car's personal gasoline per second cube measures about 1/2 inch to a side, or .00007416 cubic feet, 1/7,682,346th of the 569.72 cubic feet of the above cube.

This means that, presuming fuel consumption is directly relative to engine displacement, in order for my car's engine to consume all of the gasoline in the U.S., the pistons would have to measure roughly 48.5 feet across, and travel 54.7 feet vertically every cycle.

It's safe to assume this immense engine would run slower than the 50 rotations per second my car does, so let's take a stab in the dark and say that, flat-out, it runs at one rotation per second, or 60 RPM.

With this in mind, in order to fire one cylinder one time, it would require 2133 gallons of gasoline, or about five peoples' yearly consumption.

Your average gallon of gasoline produces roughly 158.75 cubic feet of CO2, which represents a relatively significant increase in volume. With this in mind, we're burning 4,265 gallons per second, which would come out to 677,068 cubic feet of exhaust, per second.

Divided by, say, a 20 foot exhaust pipe, the exhaust would blast out at a leisurely 2,155 feet per second, or 1.94 times the speed of sound. Remember, this is 24/7, 365, with no end in sight.

So, "What can weeEEeee do we're just peopllleee" you're all undoubtedly asking (Or maybe you just honestly don't care). 

You can stop driving for fun, you can stop taking a car to the store just to get two things, or getting your mail at the end of your driveway in your SUV, you can put honest effort into living closer to where you work, or even work from home, through the internet that takes almost no energy.

You can tolerate going ONLY a mile a minute (60mph) instead of 80 on the freeway, you can tolerate having a car that can't do 0-60 in 9 seconds (which is, I'll note, a Toyota Camry. Even our economy cars are incredibly over powered).

Perhaps the most important change you can make is just to realize the imbalance petroleum has put on our society, and that we all assume we have a RIGHT to be able to travel hundreds of miles a day if we so choose. Ask if you deserve instead of if you can afford, ask yourself where the energy would come from without petroleum.

Thanks for reading, tell your friends.