Back in college, I decided to voluntarily research the potential water and energy savings of replacing Colorado Mesa University's (Grand Junction, CO) residence hall showerheads with low-flow designs.

I met with the Residence Life director and multiple facilities managers to dig deeper into the campus water and energy usage and to gauge their comfort level of making an investment like I was planning to propose, changing out 500+ showerheads. I even sent out a survey to the campus residents to gather shower duration and temperature data. I had a blast doing the research.

So I wrote a proposal and submitted it to the director of facilities and the university president. After a short pilot program, they accepted it and replaced over 500 shower heads. The savings to the school is estimated at 5 million gallons of water, 4 billion BTUs of natural gas, and $50,000 annually.