GOAL: Reduce hair dryer use from 30 min/week to less than 5 min/week.
RESULTS: Success! On average, I used my hair dryer for 2.5 min/week. If I keep this up for a year, I will have saved 35.75 kWh of energy. Had I not bought a hair dryer in the first place, however, I would have saved even more energy. Too late for that one.
I actually found it fairly easy to reduce my hair dryer use because (lucky me) I have thin hair that is naturally straight. Had I had different hair, it might have been more difficult to accomplish this. However, I did have to make some changes to my daily routine and make a couple other small sacrifices. For example, instead of taking showers in the morning to be fresh for the day (making it much more difficult to wake up), I would take them at night and let my hair dry in my room as I was doing homework. I also had to deal with far-from-ideal hair styling – this ended up being ok with me.
FUTURE: Would I keep this routine up in the future? Definitely…Unless I become a hairstylist (not likely). In addition to reducing hair dryer use, I want to begin decreasing my use of other appliances and also begin unplugging appliances when they are not in use. This might be a seemingly small amount of energy saved, but it is still energy saved.
Is it possible to get others to reduce their hair dryer use? Of course, there are definitely people willing to make this change. But getting them to stop using hair dryers completely is be more difficult. Also, the people who use the most energy on their hair are probably going to be the ones who are least willing to change their habits because they care more about their hair. So, while reducing hair dryer use is a good thing, it would be better to try to get people to reduce their energy in other ways. Fortunately, that plan is already under way.
