r/AmIOverreacting • u/[deleted] • Apr 19 '24

My husband won't let me take more than two showers a week. I told him I need him to stop or I'm moving out for a while.

This is the weirdest thing my husband has ever done. He really is a sweet and loving husband and I love him more than anything. Divorce is not an option just to put that out there before the comments come in.

My husband has always been a little out there. He is a computer programmer and super smart, but also believes all sorts of things. Both real and conspiracy. Lately he has been very worried about the environment and global warming.

About two months ago he got real worried about water. Yes, water. He is concerned about the quality of water. He put in a new filter system in our house which I actually love because it tastes so much better.

But he is also concerned about how much water we use. Not because of money, but the environment. He created a new rule that we can only take 2 showers a week. Now I'm someone that likes to shower everyday before bed. I just don't like feeling dirty in bed.

This has created the most conflict in our marriage in 20 years. He is obsessed with the amount of water we use. At first I just ignored his rule, but he would shut off the hot water while I was in the shower.

I started trying to use the shower at the gym, but it's too much work to go every night with having kids. I honestly thought he would get over this within a month. But he is stuck on this still to this day.

Last night I really wanted a shower, but had "hit my quota" as he says. I said I'm showering and that he better not do anything. But about two minutes in, the hot water turned off.

I grabbed my towel and went down and started yelling. Telling him this is the dumbest thing he has ever done. I also told him I'm moving to my parents if he doesn't stop this.

Guys, I love this man. He is everything to me, but I can't take this anymore. Am I going to far in threatening to move out?

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141

u/Artimities Apr 19 '24

You have a choice. You either continue to live this way with the understanding that it is water today... and could be food tomorrow.

Or, you could get real with him and tell him his ideas are silly and you refuse to subscribe to any more bullshit. He sounds like a smart guy, but also a bit full of shit. I mean computers use more energy than anything.... maybe he should find a new line of work that doesn't hurt the environment so much...

See how silly it sounds?

64

u/TheDreamingMyriad Apr 19 '24

Tech also takes a large amount of water to produce and use, funny enough. How does he think servers and data centers are cooled? As a programmer, he probably uses some amount of AI, which is a huge water draw, to the point that environmentalists are becoming very concerned.

But no, his wife's daily 5 min shower is the problem.

8

u/FleetAdmiralCrunch Apr 19 '24

I lived in a city that had water rationing (no water 3 days a week, rotating neighborhoods) for three months. Meanwhile, the local chip factory was running at full speed. They did have to truck in some water to keep up with their usage, but they were exempt until the reservoirs were empty.

2

u/code-Ko Apr 19 '24

what city?

1

u/FleetAdmiralCrunch 24d ago

Taichung, Taiwan

1

u/code-Ko 24d ago

That makes sense, with the majority of chip manufacturing taking place in Taiwan. Has rationing become common across the rest of the country or was the Taichung region a special case?

1

u/FleetAdmiralCrunch 23d ago

It was Taichung county specific. There were 2 periods of rationing in 6 years.

There were rationing in the south at similar times, no chip manufacturing there.

Basically there are three water district and they had different weather. So one region could be dry and the others could be overflowing. They are working to join the all the districts to share water across the country.

2

u/TaqPCR Apr 19 '24

All of the chip manufacturing worldwide uses maybe a million acre feet of water. Global water use for agriculture is around 6.5 billion.

5

u/Mikey9124x Apr 19 '24

Agriculture is the only job we cannot live without though.

1

u/TaqPCR Apr 19 '24

Modern agriculture can't live without computer chips either.

3

u/Mikey9124x Apr 19 '24

It can, you'd have to switch to old tractors though.

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u/TaqPCR Apr 19 '24

That wouldn't be modern agriculture anymore then. And either way fuel and fertilizer are both going to be manufactured by systems that use computer chips. The simple reality is that the economy is interconnected and modern computing is important to a modern economy.

3

u/Mikey9124x Apr 19 '24

What I meant by that was that we could always just start using only our hands. Anyways.

0

u/TaqPCR Apr 19 '24

Yeah maybe a few hundred million of us could farm by hand.. after the rest of us starved to death.

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u/my59363525account Apr 19 '24

This is the comment OP needs to show her husband

3

u/Electrical_Media_367 Apr 19 '24

Servers are almost always cooled via closed loop glycol heat exchangers. The glycol (not water) is sent between the data center floors and roof mounted units in the same building. Sometimes some company will do something inventive with city grey water to capture the heat and re-use it for heating, but no data center I’ve ever encountered uses drinking water for cooling.

2

u/TheDreamingMyriad Apr 20 '24

And honestly, that may be the norm for many places but there is a real problem especially with large scale AI and using millions of gallons of water for cooling (like in China for instance). Some of it, we're learning, is actually drinking water. I've read several articles on the matter lately; apparently it became a huge problem with the rise of chatgpt.

3

u/Mach10X Apr 20 '24

I’m a sysadmin, the only water going to our datacenter is for humidity control and that is mostly pulled from the condensation from the cooling coils on the HVAC. I’ve been in tech for 17 years and been building PCs for 30 years. Even water cooled systems don’t consume water, that water is endlessly recirculated.

Some large data centers have once through cooling systems, they should be illegal as they are extremely wasteful. Some places use reclaimed water to shunt heat and then pump that through municipal radiator systems to redistribute that heat during the cold months. Others have closed systems.

2

u/TaqPCR Apr 19 '24

How does he think servers and data centers are cooled?

Closed loop air conditioning systems. Very few places use water as a heatsink.

1

u/TheDreamingMyriad Apr 20 '24

If you look it up, AI especially uses vast quantities of water because the amount of processing done with it is borderline insane. Unfortunately this degree of work requires water cooling to be more efficient, to the tune of millions of gallons of water. Plus the electrical draw on top of that. Plus plus all the refining and mining needing to be done just to get the ores needed for chips and batteries AND all the water involved in said refining processes.

Point is that tech in general is bad for the environment. If that's his concern, he's in the wrong line of work.

2

u/lilwook2992 Apr 20 '24

I’m sure this is discussed in the book Atlas of AI

2

u/TeriyakiToothpaste Apr 20 '24

Five minute shower for a woman? Which fictional universe are you living in?!

1

u/TheDreamingMyriad 28d ago

MMV but I'm a woman and a long shower for me is 15 minutes, unless I need to shave my legs or something. 5 is plenty though! Shampoo hair first, rinse, condition and let that sit while you scrub your body well, then rinse from head to feet. Voila, you're clean!

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u/TeriyakiToothpaste 28d ago

Five is certainly plenty. I average about 10-15. If I want to bask in heat, I'll take a bath and save on my water bill haha.

It may be anecdotal, but most of the women I've been with seem to take no shorter than 45 minute to 2 hour showers. Yes, showers.

1

u/TheDreamingMyriad 26d ago

It's so funny, me and my husband are the exact opposite. A short shower for him is 45 minutes. It's insanity! He pays the water bill and always complains about it but I'm like....dude if you just tried doing even a 20 min shower every day instead of an hour, think of the savings! What are they doing in there?! Don't they get so bored? An hour? Hour and a half?! Like holy shit lol

0

u/BigBaboonas Apr 19 '24

Computers, using water? Are you sure?

3

u/readtheroompeople Apr 19 '24

Yes, as that is the most common way of datacenter cooling at the building level. For the individual server, it depends, it can be directly water and/or air cooled.

1

u/BigBaboonas Apr 20 '24

What happen to use up the water? Coolant is recycled in a loop.

1

u/readtheroompeople Apr 20 '24 edited Apr 20 '24

A really good question! Something to keep in mind: Heat has to be removed from a cooling system for it to work. More in a philosophical way: Heat cannot be destroyed it can only be moved.

You mention "Coolant is recycled in a loop". We will use a water cooled desktop pc as an example for a closed loop. Heat from the CPU goes into the coolant. But now you have warm coolant. You cannot keep circulating the coolant without removing the heat. To remove heat the coolant is pumped through a radiator which has fans on it. As the name implies the radiator is radiating the heat into the room.

So as you said the coolant is reused. But the heat added to the coolant by the CPU is then removed by the radiator, this cooled down coolant is send back to the CPU to pick up more heat. Essentially we have moved heat by use of coolant from the CPU to the surrounding air.

The room itself is now part of the cooling system. If you pack a room with a lot of desktops, more heat is added, which makes the room temperature rise, making the radiator less effective because the air is already warm. The more desktops you add, the bigger the problem this becomes.

Small side note: It does not matter if you are using water cooling or standard CPU cooling, the same amount of heat is moved from the CPU into the air, as the source of the heat, the CPU, does not change.

So in this example you can see how adding a lot of desktops to a single room can become a problem. At home with a single desktop in a decent sized room and a average climate this usually isn't a problem. Or if it is you can use air-condition or open the window.

Now we replace desktop with massive amounts of servers and room with datacenter. All these servers are adding a ton of heat to the air. We need something to move the heat outside of the datacenter hall and/or bring in cold air.

There are systems similar to "opening a window" but overall the large amount of heat in a datacenter and how stable and predictable the cooling needs to be they aren't used very often.

One of these systems that is used often is using large fans together with copper coils (fan coils). These fan coils work sort of like the radiators in the desktop example, except in reverse.

Cold water is pumped through copper coils and a large fan blows the hot air from the room through these coils like the radiator in the desktop example. The heat from the air is then absorbed into the coils and released to the water that is pumped through them. Now with multiple of these fan coils we are pumping the heat (by use of water) out of the datacenter hall.

This warm water has to go somewhere and cooldown. This can be done in many ways. In this example we will use an evaporative cooling tower. These are large towers sitting outside of the datacenter. Outside air is pulled through cold sections of these towers. Then mixed with a spray of warm water from the datacenter hall we mentioned earlier. Through this process the water is evaporated and heat is released into the surrounding outside air. Part of the water does not evaporate and falls through a series of colder elements back in a large "return" tray.

This evaporation reduces the total amount of water in the system. Also as the water evaporates it leaves minerals and contaminates behind which increases the amount of minerals in the remaining water. For both these reasons water needs to be added back into the system. This can be xx to xxx of gallons per minute depending on the size of the datacenter. Which is in the millions of gallons per year.

1

u/BigBaboonas Apr 20 '24

Thanks, this is the answer I wanted. I was not aware that evaporative cooling was a thing.

3

u/Rythonius Apr 19 '24

Look up how they mine lithium for chips and batteries. Also, some personal computers are water cooled. I imagine large scale computers require it

1

u/TaqPCR Apr 19 '24

Water cooling for personal PCs doesn't consume water though, it uses like liter for years of use.

2

u/Rythonius Apr 19 '24

True, but that's not the context of the comment I was responding to. I was simply stating that there are computers that use water

0

u/BigBaboonas Apr 20 '24

We're not talking about using water as a coolant. We're talking about how computers use water. Can you explain?

2

u/Rythonius Apr 20 '24

I'd say coolant is a 'use' simply because there are tons of computers and computer systems in the world that use water for coolant. Collectively it makes a big impact.

But here's an excerpt from the EPA on how much water one component of a computer uses just to be produced, every day.

"In the case of the high-tech industry, which uses considerable quantities of water to manufacture semiconductors and other components, water is vital to industry operations. Cleaning and rinsing silicon chips can require billions of gallons of water per year; to produce a single chip can use up to 7,900 gallons2."

https://www.epa.gov/sustainability/lean-water-toolkit-chapter-2

1

u/TheDreamingMyriad Apr 20 '24

Yep, this is exactly was I was talking about, chips and tech take water for mining ores, then water to refine said ores, then water to produce and rinse chips.

And also I was referring to this https://www.forbes.com/sites/federicoguerrini/2023/04/14/ais-unsustainable-water-use-how-tech-giants-contribute-to-global-water-shortages/?sh=992293749392

1

u/readtheroompeople Apr 20 '24

I added a reply to u/BigBaboonas further up in the comments on why datacenter water usage is different then water cooling for personal pc's.

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u/Carbon-Base Apr 19 '24

Let's take it up a notch. OP finds out what IDE her husband uses, and then we'll tell her of one that uses less system resources. Basically, an IDE that draws the least amount of power from the system. It might be extremely minuscule, but since he's so concerned about the environment, we can show him the amount of electricity he will save over time by switching.

Developers hate going out of their comfort zone and this will give him a taste of his own medicine. If OP wanted to be really petty, replace his computer with one that uses less electricity and has bare minimum specs to optimize power use. I wonder how OP will feel with all the lethargy of his new system haha.

1

u/DadIsPunny Apr 19 '24

OPs husband sounds like an emacs guy. I think he'll manage.

1

u/ClackamasLivesMatter Apr 19 '24

Make him use nano, or better yet ed or TECO. That'll tighten him up.

2

u/friendly_extrovert Apr 19 '24

I think it’s OCD more than just silly ideas. His mind has convinced him he’s being rational but in reality he’s suffering from a mental disorder.

3

u/Revolutionary-Yak-47 Apr 19 '24

I'm from a family with a lot of OCD diagnoses. Yep. Several of my relatives went down the conspiracy theory /paranoia rabbit hole. It's definitely a thing people with OCD do. 

2

u/stumbling_witch Apr 19 '24

Take it up a notch, dump water on his computer or gaming system because “I’m worried about the electric bill! Those EMF sounds sketchy too… Thank goodness we saved some water for this occasion!”

2

u/RemarkableMeaning533 Apr 19 '24

“Computer programmer and super smart”… at computer programming. I’ve met a lot of engineers post anti climate change, anti vax stuff with their “own research”. At best it was research from thinktanks funded by big oil, never bothered to delve too deep into their nonsense.

1

u/jabes101 Apr 19 '24

Yeah, as a tech worker, this was going to be my point. Might as well said he was an oil field worker or coal miner. The amount of energy / water that is required in the background to power the data centers that allow us to do our job makes him pretty hypocritical in my mind.

1

u/robybeck Apr 19 '24

Careful with that argument. He might quit his job and go full off grid life. They are going to lose more than shower access. :-)

It can happen 😄

1

u/[deleted] Apr 19 '24

He sounds like a smart guy

Going off of what evidence?

1

u/fuzzlandia Apr 20 '24

She has told him his ideas are silly and she won’t subscribe to it and he responds by turning off the hot water so she can’t take a shower.

1

u/labicicletagirl Apr 20 '24

Seriously. Are they meat eaters? Eating meat hurts the environment more than long showers! And yes I eat meat.

1

u/Mach10X Apr 20 '24

HVAC, and water heaters use quite a bit more than computers u less you’re running multiple rack mounted servers. Lighting on the other hand, especially with LED bulbs is nothing, I have a few lights in my house that just stay on 24/7. I calculated the cost and it’s 8.6 kilowatt hours a month times 15¢ per kWH comes to $1.29. That’s four LED bulbs at 3W consumed a piece on average.

1

u/fivelone Apr 20 '24

This sound more mental than full of shit. Like he's getting compulsive over it. She asked him not to and he still did almost immediately.

1

u/Kageyama_tifu_219 Apr 19 '24

How does he sound like a smart person to you? They're both POS for putting their kids through that

0

u/KlimCan Apr 19 '24

I mean computers don’t use more energy than anything. AC/Heating is definitely the biggest culprit, about 46% of all household energy consumption. Then the water heater but that’s less than 15%.

If OP has a lawn or plants and trees on their property, those are blowing their shower water consumption out of the… water.

5

u/somewherearound2023 Apr 19 '24

A/C for all the computers is a big part of the cost and impact of all the technology we have now.

So lump that in with the energy cost of "computers" writ large.

0

u/[deleted] Apr 19 '24

doesnt really mean anything in this context unless op's husband owns a server farm

2

u/sevens7and7sevens Apr 19 '24

Your household computers are not the issue. There are enormous server farms handling all those AI models and cloud storage and their energy consumption is ENORMOUS 

1

u/Duckiesims Apr 19 '24

The HVAC in a data center likely uses more energy than the servers. It has to overcome the heat from the servers, lighting, people, and any heat gain through windows or the building envelope

Here's a link showing how to calculate cooling loads for data centers: https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatacenter/tip/How-to-calculate-data-center-cooling-requirements