In praise of laziness

Column: from the perspective of a parent who shepherds three people through one bathroom every morning.

Climate advice has one structural design flaw: it assumes willpower. Shorter showers, cycle more often, shop more consciously, it is all behaviour, and behaviour has to be summoned anew every day. Anyone who watches three alarm clocks, two lunchboxes and one bathroom collide at half past seven knows what willpower is still worth at that hour. Little. And that is not a character flaw; that is housing.

Hence a plea for the dullest purchase in this genre: the water-saving shower head. Five minutes with a wrench, and then years of saving follow without anyone having to think about anything, every shower, including the teenager's, who treats "five minutes" as a starting bid.

The numbers are unspectacular and convincing for precisely that reason. A standard head uses ten to twelve litres of hot water per minute, a good saving head six to seven, at equal comfort thanks to blended-in air, the harsh needle-spray of the old days is genuinely history. For three people showering around eight minutes a day, that saves 25,000 to 40,000 litres of hot water a year. With a gas boiler: 150 to 250 kilos of CO2. The head costs twenty to forty euros; the saving runs toward a hundred euros a year or more. In the entire sustainable department store there is scarcely a better ratio between effort and result; which heads test well on comfort as well as flow can be looked up at Risegoods, where one number suffices: litres per minute. The rest of the label is décor.

The principle behind it deserves more reverence than it gets. The sustainable measures that survive in a busy household are not the ones that ask for the best behaviour, but the ones that make behaviour unnecessary. Arranging something well once beats trying your best three hundred and sixty-five times. Insulation works like that, the thermostat schedule works like that, the shower head works like that. You could call it in praise of laziness, though really it is just good design.

And the children? They notice nothing. There is nothing to educate, nothing to enforce, no family meeting required. With this one measure, that is exactly the point.

Which leaves a question for in the shower, now that it may responsibly last a little longer: what else in this house could be arranged once, instead of willed every day?