First Week Experience

My first week as an Eco challenge participant has made me much more aware of my daily living habits. Because of this challenge, I have been more keenly monitoring even the most mundane of activities , and it soon came to my attention that I was very wasteful. Although keeping my appliances such as lamp desks, phone chargers and fans plugged into the wall seems harmless enough, it is an entirely unnecessary practice and I can easily prevent this and in the process save energy. Using lights and water sparingly is also something that is very easy to do, it just takes a little bit of discipline to be aware of how much you are actually using. Prior to this challenge, I usually took fairly brief showers, lasting only 3-5 minutes, and during this time I always kept the shower continuously running. Although I don't know the exact number of gallons this would amount to, I do know that I could get just as clean with about the equivalent to 30 or 40 seconds (maybe less) of the water running. I've already started this practice, which involves a brief outlet of water in the beginning, and then a brief outlet of water to rinse off all the soap at the end, and that is really all that I need to get clean. I definitely think that I would be pleasantly surprised to find out how much water I was saving over the course of several months or a year.

So far in this experiment, I feel that I have greatly improved my energy conserving habits (although I still have a ways to go) and I believe that these habits will gradually replace my wasteful ones.