Low Income Diary 2: The real cost of having a shower – can you afford it?

For some people the most expensive energy-guzzler in the home by far is the electric shower or, worse still, electric ‘power’ shower. These use shocking quantities of electricity. Luckily my hot water is provided by a gas boiler. Note that I make no mention here of having a bath; I have not had a bath in years as they are far too expensive in both water and energy.

A typical electric shower nowadays is rated at about 10kW, but can be as low as 7kW or quite a bit higher than 10. What does that mean?

A 10kW shower on for 10 minutes – plenty for a shower and hair wash – will use 1.7kWh of electricity. Because of the daily Standing Charge it is difficult to calculate the cost, especially as rates vary from one electricity retailer to another.

For example, my electricity tariff is 23p per kWh (kilowatt hour) and the Standing Charge is 66p a day. On this basis the cost of electricity alone for a 10-minute 10kW shower is 39p. How you choose to add the standing charge to this estimate is up to you.

Work it out for yourself:

1. Look up the rating of your electric shower (usually given in kW). Multiply this by your electricity tariff (usually pence per kilowatt-hour).
   Example: 12kW shower and 22p/kWh tariff – 12 x 0.22 = 2.64.
2. The result is £2.64 if the shower is on for an hour. Now divide this by 60: 2.64 ÷ 60 = 0.044. That is about 4.5p per minute.
3. Multiply the result by the number of minutes the shower is running. In this example, 8 minutes: 0.044 x 8 = 0.352.
4. Your shower cost 35p!

My electricity use

For a real-world example, my total electricity bill for one month – July 2025 – was £38.79, or £59.27 including the standing charge. I live alone but spend most days indoors 24 hours a day. In other words I use less electricity than some, but not as little as a single person who leaves home to work five days a week.

If I had an electric shower – thankfully I do not – a shower a day would add about £11.70 per month to my bill. So, my July bill would have been £50.49 plus standing charge.

Now, that is totally unaffordable on my low fixed income. So what would I do?

My shower bill

My landlord provides a gas condensing combi-boiler, which is ideal for people who live alone (but not, in my opinion, for families). The boiler is nearly 20 years old and very inefficient, which does not seem to concern my landlord very much, but then he isn’t paying the gas bill!

A unit of gas is always less expensive than a unit of electricity. Compare this with my electricity tariff above: gas is 5.9p per kWh and the standing charge is 29.4p a day. In my case I use gas only for heating and hot water, so for much of the year the standing charge is far higher than the amount of gas I use! I think that is unfair but that is a story for another day.

My monthly gas bill for July 2025 was £2.05 but including the standing charge it was £11.15.

The cost of a shower is about 5p without the standing charge. If I have a shower every day that would be £1.55 for the month.

Electric shower: 39p (plus Standing Charge)
Gas shower: 5p (plus Standing Charge)

These prices are a guide only and will vary according to the rating and age of your appliance. The gas price is a real-world example based on my own energy monitoring.

I cannot afford to have a shower every day! And, before you agonise over my body odour, I do not really need a shower every day. I do little in the way of physical work and have decided that a money (and environment) saving measure I can take is to shower twice a week.

Should you take pity on me and want to take me out for a beer I would recommend a Wednesday or Saturday, as those are the days I usually have a shower in the morning!

Showering two days a week would cost about 40p, saving me £1.15 a month compared to a daily shower!!

Of course, somedays when I am working harder than usual in the garden or moving furniture from one room to another, I may need an extra shower, but I feel I can just about afford such occasional luxuries!

So, to sum up,

• gas showers are usually a lot cheaper than electric showers
• modern boilers are less costly to run than older ones
• why have a shower every day if you do not really need it!

Things can be – and often are – more complex than this. For example, in a world with more renewable energy our electricity bills would be lower, but we are not there yet. We should also factor in the capital cost of the heat source – e.g. gas boiler, heat pump, electric shower.

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