Eco-living | Louisa Pearson : When your morning scrub uses up to 45 litres of water perm inute, isn't it time you had your head examined?

FOR the last 18 months, I've been using one of the most eco-friendly showers known to humankind. One step up from a bucket by a stream, it involves heating the water tank by letting the fire burn for a couple of hours, following which I get to crouch in a freezing old cast-iron bath, plug in a plastic shower attachment and twist the taps. One millimetre in the wrong direction leads to either a scalding or an icy blast.

"I haven't kneeled in a bath since I was a wee boy," said my dad, dazed and traumatised after trying out this deluxe showering experience. My parents opted to stay in B&Bs on subsequent visits, rather than having to relive the nightmare.

There are two good things about this shower, although I'm not convinced they outweigh the misery. First, it costs nothing to run. The logs for the fire are free and no electricity is used in powering the mighty stream of water. The second plus point is that the cold unpleasantness of it all keeps showers short.

Like learning to enjoy olives, this has been a case of overcoming one's natural instincts. At heart, I'm a five-star-hotel, power-shower kind of girl. Intensive hair-conditioning masks, exfoliating body scrubs and that kind of malarkey used to be my trademark, all of which would lead to the, "Did you fall asleep in the shower?" sort of comments. (What I should have been hearing was, "Darling, I didn't think it was possible, but you look more beautiful than ever. What shampoo are you using these days?")

So I'm conserving water and power, but I think we've all realised that the sacrifice this has entailed is unacceptable. My new mission is to find a shower that will feel like stepping into a heated waterfall, without actually getting through too many gallons of water or megawatts of electricity. Waterwise (www.waterwise.org.uk) says that showers can use between six and 45 litres of water per minute. So I got quite excited reading up about water-efficient shower heads, made by companies such as Kohler Mira and Challis. These "aerate" the water, and can reduce the amount you use by up to 75 per cent, with knock-on savings in terms of the amount of energy needed to heat the water.

The reviews I read were mixed. Some people said these showerheads were as good as a power shower, others were less convinced. The research came to an abrupt halt when I learned they aren't compatible with electric showers. I do have a combi boiler, but it is downstairs and at the other side of the house, so linking it up to a shower would take pipes, pumps and other things that only plumbers know about. So an electric shower it must be. They work like kettles, apparently, and we all know how fast the electricity meter spins round when you're boiling water for a cuppa.

One report suggests that electric showers create two and a half times as much CO2 per kWh of energy used as showers that use water from gas boilers, but I came across the Triton 8.5 kWh Eco electric shower, which claims to be 28 per cent more energy-efficient than a mixer shower running off a conventional boiler.

As I have neither the mathematical nor the plumbing skills to find a definitive answer on this one, I will be opting for a modest electric shower, up to 9kWh, and will be restricting the duration of showers. Perhaps I'll even go so far as to purchase a timer that beeps when your five minutes are up. Either that or I'll rely on the tried and tested method of my cohabitee shouting, "Hurry up in there, do you know how much money that shower's costing?"

• This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday on 07 February 2010