Other than pounding on the bathroom door, there is little one can do to get family members (read teenagers) to take shorter showers. But with mandatory water conservation possibly coming down the pipeline in California’s third year of drought,  one Denver-based company said it has the invention that will help households get through these dry times: the Shower Manager.

The Shower Manager can be programmed to run for five, eight or 11 minutes at full flow. After a warning beep it cuts the flow by two-thirds, just enough to rinse. Five minutes have to pass before it can be reset – an eternity in a shower.

One satisfied customer, Lisa J, was quoted by the company as saying her kids ”call it the Shower Nazi.” The Web site claims a family of four (including two teens) can save $400 annually in water and heating costs - compared to the product’s online price of $125.

There is a cheaper alternative to promoting — though not enforcing — shorter showers. For $15.50, you can get a shower timer in the shape of a duck, a turtle or a star. One person on flickr showed their duck timing a 3 minute shower, prompting the comment (from a teen?): “Woah! I would have a hard time with three-minute showers.”

Photo credit: Reuters/Mark Blinch (A woman takes a shower in a Toronto gym.)

The results are in and no surprise — California’s lean snowpack means a third year of drought for the state whose farms supply about half the nation’s fruit and vegetables.

The state’s survey clocks in at 81 percent of normal water content in the snow, with the state fearing early spring heat could melt the white stuff, leaving fewer reserves later in the summer when they are most needed. Plus a National Marine Fisheries Service report, called a biological opinion, may trigger more conservation measures to protect salmon and steelhead, cutting water left for farms and homes.

Things have improved a tinge since Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a drought emergency in February, but the state, eyeing climate change,  is preparing for a dry 2010 and says that statewide storage is about 5 million acre feet below average. Since one acre foot is enough for a household or two for a year, that’s a lot.

Photocredit: Reuters/Lee Celano (A US Forest Service vehicle drives past snow-covered cactus in Joshua Tree National Park, California March 11, 2006)

After an hourlong tour of the world’s largest wastewater recycling plant, where 70 milion gallons of pre-treated sewer discharge is distilled daily to help replenish the underground drinking supply of Orange County, California, I was led to a sink with a faucet. There I was presented with a plastic cup and invited to take a sip.

Crystal clear and utterly tasteless, the sample was refreshing and perfectly safe for human consumption.  Some minerals are actually reintroduced to the water before it’s pumped back out of the ground for general consumer use.

Michael Markus, general manager of the Orange County Water District and the chief engineer behind the plant, assured me that the water exceeds all government drinking standards, even though the state requires the county to put it into the local aquifer — for additional natural filtration — before offering it to the public.

NASA has recently developed a new system for purifying urine and other wastewater for astronauts to drink in space. But this is wastewater recycling for the masses.

The technology has been available for years but was long disparaged by cynics in the media and politics as “toilet-to-tap.”

Now with drought-related water shortages expected to worsen from climate change, even as cities continue to grow, the scarcity and escalating price of fresh surface water has made recycling more economically viable and helped it overcome the “yuck” factor.

The year-old, $481 million Orange County facility, called the Groundwater Replenishment System, produces enough purified water to meet the drinking needs of 500,000 people and is serving as a model for numerous cities across California looking to augment their own aquifer supplies.

Several smaller plants exist around the world, including one in the southern African country of Namibia, where purified wastewater is added directly into the public drinking supply, without first percolating through an aquifer or settling in a reservoir. In the parlance of the industry, that’s called “direct potable reuse.”

Look at Part 3 of our series on the water crisis in the U.S. West for more on recycling and other water technologies, including ocean water desalination.

Photo credit: Reuters/Steve Gorman (Michael Markus, general manager of the Orange County Water District, stands near a microfiltration unit in February 2009).

The fast-growing U.S. Southwest has a problem: too many people, not enough water.

But then, what do you expect when you build cities like Las Vegas in the middle of a desert?

My colleagues Tim Gaynor and Steve Gorman have done a story on this, looking at the water woes of Los Angeles and Las Vegas. You can see their report here and other stories from our water package here.

Tim joined the “water warriors” of Las Vegas, city investigators who enforce restrictions on usage; Steve looked at the dire situation in Los Angeles, America’s second largest city.

Tim accompanied waste water investigator Dennis Demera as he followed a tell-tale trickle of water up the dusty concrete gutter to a house in suburban Las Vegas, the United States’ driest big city.

This is one of the violations that we look for,”  Demera said, pointing to a broken sprinkler head in the sparse lawn of the detached home in residential Surfline Drive.

A water cop employed by the Southern Nevada Water Authority, it is Demera’s job to claw back wasted water one gallon at a time — and it’s a job for our times.

 Most of the U.S. Southwest’s fast growing cities are built either in the scalding deserts or on their fringes, where H2O has always been a scarce resource.

Now as the area is hit by droughts and higher temperatures, possibly linked to climate change, water scarcity is driving those desert cities to respond to scarcity in a variety of ways.

It begs the question: should cities of such size exist in such places in the first place? Is this kind of urban growth really sustainable into the future? What do you think?

Photo credit: Reuters/David Becker (Las Vegas water sleuth Dennis Demera looks for leaks, February 2009)

The drought-induced infernos which ravaged parts of Australia earlier this year may be a harbinger of the water challenges coming to the American West.

 ”Think of that (Australia) as California’s future,” water researcher Heather Cooley of California’s Pacific Institute told my colleague Peter Henderson. You can see his report, part one of our series on water scarcity in the U.S. West, here.

Plush green golf courses in the desert, verdant boulevards in Los Angeles and fountains that dance 20 stories high in Las Vegas are very much part of today’s landscape and life in the American West.  As California author James Powell says: “Add water and you have the instant good life.”

But as the reports in our series show, the region is in for some tough decisions on the water front as urban populations swell, farmland competes for dwindling supplies, and climate change models predict more droughts and floods and a melting of the snowpack so crucial to life in the West.

Yet in a region known for its technological innovation, the U.S. West could also be a leader in  showing the world how to deal with water crisis. Learn more in parts two, three and four of the series, this week.

Photo credit: Reuters/David Becker (The “bathtub ring” grows as water levels drop in Lake Mead, near Las Vegas, Nevada, February 2009 )