A weary traveller steps into the shower of a hotel bathroom. As the hot water hits, a familiar mental oblivion sets in, easing the exhaustion of the day. She is on her way to a mindless, 35-minute soak. In doing so, she is also burning through nearly 250 litres of hot water and pushing the hotel’s boiler plant hard.

This scenario plays out thousands of times a day across the hospitality sector. In a normal day in Britain, the average person directly consumes around 137 litres of water. Most people have no idea. A 2025 poll by Water UK revealed that people believe they only use about 20 or 30 litres daily. Everyday habits add up quickly. Washing a car with a hose can easily use 500 litres of water, and a continuously leaking toilet flush can quietly waste up to 400 litres a day.

When people travel, however, they become far heavier consumers. Hotel facilities operators have long grappled with the burden of excessively long showers, with some guests even running hot water purely to steam the wrinkles out of their clothes.

But what if, at the seventh minute of that steamy deluge, the water temperature began to fade ever so slowly down to a mild 32°C? The water pressure would remain entirely unchanged, but a gentle, subconscious signal in the guest’s brain would let her know that the shower was naturally concluding, prompting her to step out and get on with her day.

This is the idea behind Showerkap, the Gold Winner in the Innovation Champion category at the 2026 Engineering Matters Awards. Judged by representatives from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and Engineers Without Borders UK, the Innovation Champion award considers entrants across all categories, looking for transformative products, processes, and projects. Showerkap took gold for combining sensorisation with nudge technology to cut water and energy waste in commercial showers.

Counting millilitres

Over the past two decades, the corporate and engineering worlds have built a detailed language around energy and carbon. The industry calculates kilowatt-hours saved, tracks scope one, two and three emissions, and builds dashboards for regulators and building owners. Water has had no equivalent treatment.

Part of this disparity lies in the nature of the resources. A kilogram of carbon released anywhere on Earth enters the collective global atmosphere. Water is entirely local. The United Kingdom’s geography shows the divide. Woodlands in Wales and on the west coast of Scotland are temperate rainforests, receiving up to 5,000 millimetres of rainfall every year. Parts of the southeast and east of England get as little as 600 millimetres a year; the threshold for a desert climate is 250.

For all Britain’s reputation for rain, parts of England are seriously water-stressed. Climate change is making the country wetter overall, through heavier winter rain, while summers get drier. While the built environment learned to count carbon and kilowatts, it remained largely ignorant of its millilitres, often having no idea where, when, or why water was disappearing from a building’s system. And the final control point is a person relaxing after a long flight, which calls for a light touch.

A now problem

Carly Hunt, Head of Strategic Partnerships and a board director at Showerkap, sees this blind spot as an infrastructure problem as much as an environmental one.

“England faces a 5 billion litre shortfall in our public water supply by 2055,” Hunt warns. The Environment Agency puts that shortfall at 5 billion litres a day, driven by a rising population, spiralling water usage, and lack of rainfall. “It is very much a now problem and something that we need to action to obviously reduce that risk and build a much more resilient future.”

In 2020, the UK faced £300 billion in water-related risks. According to Hunt, that number is rising fast. “That figure is now forecasted to reach £3.1 trillion by 2034. So it’s very much becoming a very material business risk, and not just an environmental one,” she notes. “We just don’t know how to visualize or measure what we use.”

Hunt points out that while the planet is covered in oceans, only one percent of the Earth’s water is fresh, accessible and drinkable. The disconnect in domestic settings mirrors the wider public misunderstanding. “Most of us think that we actually only use about 62 litres of water in our household a day, when in reality, we’re using five times that, so about 323 litres,” Hunt explains.

An empty tank

Showerkap’s origins are domestic. The company was founded in May 2022 by Steve Harding. During the pandemic lockdowns, Harding noticed that his teenagers were using up the home’s hot water supply with long showers.

“They were actually running out of hot water in the tank,” Hunt says. “As an engineer and a problem solver, he was very much set his mind to helping to find that solution, which in turn would also help address… the wider issues of global water scarcity.”

While the initial inspiration was residential, the company started with commercial buildings, where consumption is far higher. Because human behaviour changes in hospitality settings – often resulting in up to 50 percent more water usage – hotels became the primary target for the technology.

Measure, nudge, optimise

The Showerkap system combines whole-building fixture-level monitoring, behavioural change incentives, and a shower fade timer that provides a real-time behavioural cue at the point of use.

“We have that patented fade technology in the shower valve, which has the built-in behavioural nudge that gently prompts those shorter shower durations without restricting flow,” Hunt says. The system relies on internet-of-things sensors that record usage at showers, toilets, basins, baths, and back-of-house systems. “That all relays back to a cloud-based analytics platform, and that turns that data into all these actionable insights for operators.”

With flow turned into data, building managers can spot patterns and anomalies and act on them quickly. “We measure, we can nudge, and we can optimize what’s happening in a building, and it’s that engineering, behavioural science, and data working together, which helps reduce that waste at source,” Hunt explains. Operators get room-by-room visibility, which hotels have rarely had, along with early leak detection and water safety monitoring.

The shower as steam press

The data has also confirmed what hotel facilities teams long suspected about guest behaviour. Guests were found leaving taps running, allowing baths to overflow, and falling asleep with the water on. Some were using the shower as a steam press. “Leaving showers on for 45 minutes to an hour to steam clothes,” Hunt reveals.

Tackling this in a premium hotel is delicate. Guests paying top rates do not want cost-cutting imposed on them, or a building system dictating their morning routine. This is where Showerkap’s optional nudge comes in.

“It’s a very natural sensation of the hot water gradually running out… which gently, obviously, just encourages you to leave the shower,” Hunt says. The system does not cut the guest off. Over a controlled 60-second period, the patented valve gradually reduces the hot water and increases the cold water. The flow rate stays the same, but the temperature drops to a comfortable but noticeable 32°C.

Seven minutes at Gatwick

Because the system relies on real data gathered during an initial collection period, the fade time is tailored to each building’s usage patterns. Showerkap recently completed a year-long pilot in a Gatwick hotel, in the water-stressed southeast of England.

“The median shower duration and extreme long duration showers actually informed us that we should set the fade at about seven minutes,” Hunt explains.

Prior to the installation, some high-end users were taking showers lasting upwards of 35 minutes, using 245 litres of water in a single session. Once the seven-minute fade was introduced, the hotel saw a 67 percent reduction in these extreme high-end users.

Complaints did not follow. Guests can opt out, but almost none did. During the year-long trial, 99 percent of the hotel guests kept the timer on. Only three individuals out of the entire pilot requested not to use it.

Overall, the pilot achieved a 34 percent reduction in overall shower times and dropped guest water consumption by 23 percent, bringing the average down to approximately 90 litres per person. The hotel’s carbon emissions from water heating fell by 24 percent.

The data had maintenance uses too. By tracking usage closely, Showerkap found mechanical faults hidden in the building’s infrastructure, revealing temperature inconsistencies and pressure issues. “It actually discovered problems and was very kind of proactive rather than reactive, and was able then to fix those issues immediately,” Hunt notes. Maintenance teams fixed the same day faults that would otherwise have gone unnoticed.

From hotels to homes

The next step for Showerkap is scale. The technology is already live in a university alongside the pilot hotel, and the company is preparing to roll the system out across multiple commercial sites.

“We need to kind of step up and scale it to multiple buildings, and to really kind of I suppose dive a bit deeper into the analytics,” Hunt says. The expansion plan targets the wider UK market first, followed by the European Union, aided by the company’s close work with the Unified Water Label. Once the commercial sector is firmly established, Showerkap intends to return to its roots and scale the technology for domestic households.

To support this, the team is building application programming interfaces so its sensors can plug into wider digital building systems. Funding collaborations with Ofwat, MOSL and the Cambridge Water Efficiency Fund are tying Showerkap into the UK’s water efficiency work.

For the weary traveller stepping into the hotel shower, none of this background engineering matters. She does not see the analytics dashboard, and nobody lectures her about a daily shortfall of five billion litres in the public water supply. At the seven-minute mark, the water simply cools. She steps out, refreshed, unaware that the litres she didn’t use are still in the tank for the next guest.