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There’s nothing better than a long, hot shower after a particularly grueling day, but with energy costs soaring nationwide, it might be hard to justify pushing the water heater to its limit.

However, by upgrading to a heat pump water heater, you might feel a little less guilty about savoring that time in your steamy oasis. Heat pump water heaters draw heat from the surrounding air to warm your water, rather than burning fuel or relying on energy-intensive heating elements.

Lake Shasta waters lapped higher after a series of atmospheric rivers dumped up to a foot of rain in the region.

Not counting runoff, storms added 12-14 inches of rain to all areas of the lake between Dec. 19 — when the series of wet winter storms started — and Dec. 26, said Nathan Rick with the National Weather Service Sacramento branch. Another 1.5 inch was expected to fall before the Dec. 27-28 weekend.

A year ago, officials were sounding alarms about a bone-dry winter that days later would combine with hurricane-strength winds to bring about the worst fires in Los Angeles history. Now, Southern California just experienced its wettest Christmas in modern history.

This Christmas Eve and Christmas Day were the rainiest in the modern record for Southern California, according to the National Weather Service office in Oxnard. And more rain is on the way. A flood watch was forecast to remain in effect for much of the state through at least Friday afternoon, with rain expected throughout the day. Skies should clear up by the weekend.

The president of the Utah State Senate has an idea he thinks could help states along the Colorado River. “What we do in Utah is we solve problems and that’s what we’re in the middle of,” Senate President J. Stuart Adams, R-Layton, said in a recent interview with FOX 13 News.

His idea is to pay California to build more desalination plants along the Pacific Ocean for their water needs. In exchange, they’d give up some shares of water along the Colorado River for Utah and other upstream states to use.