PrintThe EPA wants to watch you in the shower
You've had a long, exhausting day at work, and all you can think about when you walk through the door to your house is peeling off your clothes and taking a relaxing shower.
Before you do, you had better make sure the EPA isn't showering with you. The agency wants to monitor people's showering habits – all to save water, don't you know.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) wants hotels to monitor how much time its guests spend in the shower.
The agency is spending $15,000 to create a wireless system that will track how much water a hotel guest uses to get them to “modify their behavior.”
“Hotels consume a significant amount of water in the U.S. and around the world,” an EPA grant to the University of Tulsa reads. “Most hotels do not monitor individual guest water usage and as a result, millions of gallons of potable water are wasted every year by hotel guests.”
“The proposed work aims to develop a novel low cost wireless device for monitoring water use from hotel guest room showers,” it said. “This device will be designed to fit most new and existing hotel shower fixtures and will wirelessly transmit hotel guest water usage data to a central hotel accounting system.”
The funding is going toward creating a prototype and market analysis for the device. The goal of the project is to change the behavior of Americans when they stay at hotels.
“This technology will provide hotel guests with the ability to monitor their daily water online or using a smartphone app and will assist hotel guest in modifying their behavior to help conserve water,” the grant said.
The project was filed under “Water conservation,” “Urban water planning,” and “Sustainable water management.”
The EPA also has a WaterSense program that challenges hotels to track their water use and upgrade their restrooms with low-flow toilets and showerheads.
The program also encourages “linen and towel reuse programs” in guest rooms.
The EPA is concerned that the average shower, which lasts just eight minutes, uses 18 gallons of water, and has asked Americans to reduce their shower length by at least one minute.
You can bet that before too long, there will be a move by the EPA to place one of those gizmos in every single home in America. It will eventually be connected to the home's water system, with an auto-shutdown valve to enforce their idea of how much water you should be using to get clean. You may be washing your hair when the water is suddenly turned off, leaving you with a headfull of suds and anger management issues.
Far-fetched? Of course. But bureaucracies want to be so helpful in showing us how to live our lives that government restrictions on private water use probably seems like a good idea to them.
The parody above is far-fetched only today. Tomorrow? Who knows?
