WTVO/WQRF - You could be saving water, and not even know it.  It's all about a little piece of plastic called a low-flow shower head.  With it, you're saving money and water.  Without it, you're letting more than cash go down the drain.

"normally I take about a 40-minute to an hour shower, because it's my only time to relax and chill out," says Valerie Overton.

Valerie washes away a hundred gallons of water every day.  Most of us spend half that amount of time in the shower.  Do the math and an average American shower equals about 50-gallons of water.  That's 18,000 gallons a year, or enough to fill a couple of backyard pools.  You could save half that water for about ten bucks.  Low flow shower heads are an industry standard.  But many of us don't even know if we have one.

Chances are if you've changed your shower head in the last five years, you're using a low flow model.  There's an easy way to tell.

"Well, there's an adaptor in the majority of them that you can tell whether it's low flow or not, says Mike Antey, a bathroom designer.  “It's a little insert put in there, and if it's in there it'd obviously be the low flow. If it's not then it's going be pretty well the standard.”

We decided to do a little experiment.  Our goal was to test water consumption and pressure.  We started on a shower with a full flow head.  We ran water full blast for two minutes into a five gallon bucket.  When time was up, we marked the water line with red tape.  Next we installed an inexpensive low flow head.  Two minutes later we marked the water line again, this time with blue tape.  Obviously, water was saved.  Our next test was for water pressure.  That's a common complaint with low flow shower heads.

We put shaving cream on a mirror under the full flow head.  15-seconds later the mirror was clean.  We repeated the process under the low flow head.  15-seconds later the mirror was just as clean.  Low flow shower heads range in price from 10  to hundreds of dollars.

By the way, the water we gathered during our experiment was saved and used to water a few plants around the house.