Mist Showers: Sustainable Decadence? (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Mist Showers: Sustainable Decadence? (2019)

solar.lowtechmagazine.com

98 pointshochmartinez123 comments

The missing component in all of these green initiatives aimed at changing human behavior is a simple feedback loop. Put a fucking indicator somewhere in the shower that tells people how much water they used, or better yet, energy, or better yet, carbon. Show them their week over week, month over month, etc information and positively reward them (via tone—and other UI hints—of the message, e.g., “you reduced your shower carbon by X this month! Great work!”). If you do that even my backwoods relatives who still burn their garbage will start using less and less water, even all the while talking about how climate change is all a hoax.

Sure let's gamify everything. "Congratulations you've responded to your emails 6% faster this week! To celebrate this a $5 gift card had been added to your amazon account!"

I think this is not a tech problem, to change the behavior people need to care about the environment.

A lot of people ignore the problem because they don't see a direct correlation between what they do and the damage they are doing, it's conveniently abstracted away from their sight, I don't think gamification per se would help much but in general exposure to ones consequences would.

> I think this is not a tech problem, to change the behavior people need to care about the environment.

I fail to see how they're incompatible. GP's suggestion is a way to put the impact of people's habits in front of them rather than have that information be mixed with a hundred other signals and only available from indicators somewhere in the basement. In the same way you might use a kill-a-watt or 3 to see how much your various devices and appliances are consuming in what mode.

And having goals is a pretty well-known way to motivate people, hence the "gamification".

To change behavior you need to make people want to change, give them the ability to change, and create an environment conducive to change. Without all those pieces all bets are off.

Feedback loops are a psychological solution. Implement them without tech if you like, but good luck making that efficient. Anyway, if you have a magic wand to make enough people care enough about the environment immediately, please do wave it. :)

Absent that, I can’t imagine feedback loops are harmful with respect to our collective political will; on the contrary, I would expect daily positive feedback to change attitudes over somewhat small timescales, especially as more and more people participate and it is more normalized. But this is pure speculation and optimizing showering is not where we should spend our limited political will anyway.

I might be in a minority overall, but I really dislike gamification creeping into everyday life. I don't want some kind of cutesy "points" for showering ecologically, possibly linked to a virtual currency on an app (which conventiently also collects vital telemetry information).

The point isn't really gamification, it's providing information to the user. If you don't have any information on your consumption, you'll have a hard time reducing it even if you wanted to.

Typically, we provide that feedback by charging for resource use, and that works extremely well (most recent anecdote from my area: as the local rented garden community started measuring water usage and splitting the bill by usage instead of head count, usage dropped by 70% without any damage by under-watering), but that's generally a longer-term aggregate and immediate feedback works much better.

It’s kind of gamification, at least the bit about explicit positive reinforcement. But “neutral” feedback loops are inherently positively reinforcing, as your anecdote indicates.

I don’t like the gamification of everything either, but if the fate of the planet hinges on it (it doesn’t), I suppose I could stomach it.

I don't mind gamification personally. I'll do it to myself, even if it's just the harmless kind of "just keep running until you've reached that tree ... now that tree over there" to keep me going. Gamification works even if you know that it's gamification.

I agree that it brings up ethical issues when you're using gamification for behavior modification of others, but on the other hand it's also a bit like communication (as in "you cannot not communicate", the absence of a signal is a signal as well), when you choose not to gamify something, you're choosing to strengthen the habits that are currently in place.

I like your example, but here's some of my own: I was told as a child not to leave the tap on when brushing my teeth. There was a campaign to put a brick in your toilet cistern to reduce the amount of water used on each flush. I take more showers than baths. I have a low-flow shower, I turn it off for the bit in the middle where I'm applying the soap/gel, and I've now read an article saying that a mist shower would be even better at saving water.

None of these items is in any way quantified or measured - but all of them have or could contribute to me saving water even if none of them has a measuring device attached.

I've gone through many of the same things, up to the point where I had to beg my father to remove some of the stones because it was uncomfortable that the toilet wouldn't actually flush.

I think that one-time-actions like these are easier to do without constant feedback. Somebody measures it, explains the savings to you, you do it once, done. Usage-based savings likely require more frequent feedback unless you're somebody that has a very fine-tuned habit system.

It doesn't need to be digital feedback. Imagine you could physically see the water from a shower filling into a column of water. Let's say 70 liters might reach 6 ft. If someone could see this and wanted to use less water, then they just need to keep their showers short enough that the water fills to the 60 liter mark, then the 40 liter mark, until they're happy with their efforts. No crypto currency. No telemetry.

That I could get behind. The parent post though said "positively reward them (via tone—and other UI hints—of the message, e.g., “you reduced your shower carbon by X this month! Great work!”)" and that crosses my personal line for creepiness.

What you are referring to has significant overlaps to my concept of “libertarian paternalism,” more familiar to me as so-called “benevolent paternalism,” and was popularized by the book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_paternalism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_(book)

Thank you for mentioning Kohn’s work.

It boggles my mind how super smart people just don’t get that human beings cannot be incentivized the same way rats and birds can.

Reward/punishments (same thing) kill intrinsic motivation. It has been proven countless times.

Providing feedback as in making something visible is another story altogether and can be empowering.

Speaking to people like an adult trying to manipulate 3-year olds is condescending, inappropriate and repulsive.

Not going to lie, I'd feel compelled to either completely fill, or completely empty that column.

No, I agree. While I would love to see a water meter, I don’t need the shower head making commentary like “great job!”

It might come over less childish if the system (the system's designers) didn't shy away from negativity.

being scolded by my shower is not exactly the future dystopia I imagined.

It would probably be more like:

<Cheery Computer Voice> "Water-flow will be resumed after these messages... "<Ads Play...>

Playing an ad in the shower after 5 minutes would definitely make me take shorter showers and use less water. You could be on to something there.

I can imagine that as a scene in Demolition Man

Actually it's exactly the kind of thing that gamification works for. Gamify boring scutwork that nobody (except the likely contrarian responder here) enjoys. Gamify showering, flossing, or taking out the garbage and all the tasks that people aren't deeply invested in but with existing habits they'd like to improve.

Alfie Kohn, in his book Punished by Rewards, synthesized decades of actual research results on the subject long before gamification was even minted as a term.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/541132.Punished_by_Rewar...

Being able to see how many resources you have used or have left has been around since the dawn of time. A stack of logs from which you take away for example. Being able to see how much water you use is as much "gamification" as a fuel meter on a dash board.

I don’t want gamification but having the data is good. It would also be nice if I could set the shower to a certain temperature instead of guessing every time.

This sounds almost feasible if one feels comfortable to install a flow meter and a thermometer into the tap, and to hook it up with a microcontroller. Setting a certain temperature requires more work. I wonder whether there are products on the market for this already.

My parents used to have one with a mechanical thermostat. It was pretty simple and worked well once you had figured out your target temperature.

Doesn't need to be points, just feedback. In fact the GP didn't mention points. I have no idea how much water I spend in a shower. 5l? 10l? 50l? I can look up estimates, but that's it. This would be valuable feedback for many people, even without the gamification part.

I started designing this kind of device. In addition to tracking consumption, the concept had automatic mixing of hot/cold water to get good stable temperature. And a timer to facilitate non-continuous showers, press once to get wet, then soap in while shower is off, press again to rinse off.

I'm guessing you might be able to make money selling that to, e.g. the military, but not to regular people. Most take showers at least in part to relax, and that sounds like it would kill any possibility of relaxation.

Agreed, at least in volume. Which is more or less needed for a hardware product like this. There might be one can reach some thousands via the Internet, maybe using a Kickstarter type platform. But probably would quickly saturate its own niche market.

> tells people how much water they used, or better yet, energy, or better yet, carbon.

If you want to really change behavior, show them how much it cost them.

You'll see usage plummet as soon as people see the $/£/€ ticking up in front of their eyes.

You’re probably right! Why not show both?

The Sunrize Izumo, one of the last two remaining japanese sleeper trainshas something like that - from necessity. The on board water supply is limitted, so a vending mashine on board sells a given ammount of shower-cards, that let you shower for an alotted number of minutes, counted with second precission on a LED display in the shower.

This way the on board shower will not run out of water & you get the opportunity to do a shower speedrun. :)

probably depends on how meaningful the cost of utilities is to you. I try to use AC and heat sparingly just because I hate the idea of waste; it really annoys me if I have to turn on the heat a few nights later because I turned on my AC too early. but my whole utility bill is ~$70/month. I don't really care too much about saving 10-20% of that.

water is far too cheap for this to work

Depends on your location. For example, this could be very effective someplace like the southwest US.

Obviously it wouldn't work everywhere, but it could work for a few people I know personally.

I've found such a device once in a hostel in Germany. The device was from Amphiro. [0]

Being that hostels focus on savings, I understood why such a device could be useful. As for myself, after a day-long trip it ended up being a frustating shower. The thresholds were so low that you have to take a Navy shower to have a good grade. And the polar bear display reminded me that Germany is mostly coal-powered and that a KWh here has a much bigger impact on the environment than a KWh from France.

I got out of the shower cold, wet, and worst of all, not feeling clean. I wondered if it would not have been better not to take a shower at all. It sure would have saved more water and energy.

[0]: https://www.amphiro.com/en/

Well a quick search turns up about 29.3% coal, that's a lot compared to specifically France (1.8%). That's because France is crazy into nuclear (71.6%) which the green movement made wildly unpopular in Germany (13.7%). To add one more comparison point, US is 23.5% coal and 19.7% nuclear. Natural gas is 10.5% in Germany, 7.7% in France, and 38.4% in the US.

Used these sources:

[1] D https://strom-report.de/strom/

[2] F https://www.planete-energies.com/en/medias/close/france-s-ov...

[3] US https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3

I too discovered the device in a German hotel. For first-time users, it seems gamified towards the opposite goal. As I was under the shower for far longer than normal, I found out it was slowly drowning a polar bear.

A patronizing talking device would just make me swear at it every time I see it.

But give me charts and graphs, and show me "You spent this much money for water/heating this week", and people will probably also be incentivized to save.

This is certainly an interesting idea, but what's the initial value proposition to customers? How do you convince someone to pay extra to install such an appliance?

We already get the feedback, in the utility bill. If people ignore it is because the prices are too low for water and power.

A lot of people don't directly see that. For example if you rent in NYC, you have probably never seen how much water you consume, because the landlord pays the water bill. You might not even directly pay some other utilities like heat and hot water (a lot of apartment buildings have a single boiler for the entire building's heat and hot water).

Agreed, also if my shower had a button that turned the water on for thirty seconds, I’d use it for a Navy shower

People will probably just learn to ignore the meter. If mist showers are so good for the environment, they should install them into every home for free, or even pay people to do it. Too many times the environmental friendly solution costs $$$, pricing out the majority of people, so only wealthy and hip people could afford to use them and virtue signal on social media about it.

> The daily shower would be hard to sustain in a world without fossil fuels.

If this is really true, then I see no hope for us. Humans will not make sacrifices to their way of life voluntarily, and will politically punish anyone who makes them do so. When this comes before the voters, “I am the person taking away your hot showers” is going to be a losing stance.

We can’t “conserve” our way out of this. We will need a breakthrough in clean energy tech. We need a world where the energy for hot showers is plentiful and clean.

Austerity measures are passed all the time under guises of a balanced budget or trimming fat. When govts cut food stamps people die, I think govts cutting hot showers might be doable.

While I partly agree with you, unpopular political moves are weaponised during elections. If the opposition win they can revoke previous changes. This highlights issues around populism, and democracy in general.

"Humans" aren't an inherent unchangeable force of nature. What you're describing is a result of living in the current socio-economical system, which can be changed.

I took it as implied that the change has to happen in the near future, before runaway climate change is a fate-sealing certainty. And we don’t need to change the current socio-economic system in any fundamental way; we just need to tax pollution so the cost isn’t externalized. This is a pretty simple, small change; just need the political will.

> Humans will not make sacrifices to their way of life voluntarily

I don't think that's true at all.

Currently (speaking from the UK at least) people have been making huge sacrifices in their lives for months. Although ostensibly this has been enforced, in reality it is impossible to police and has almost entirely been done voluntarily, through persuasion, and with much popular support. These sacrifices have been far greater than using less water in showers.

> We can’t “conserve” our way out of this. We will need a breakthrough in clean energy tech.

It's no use being defeatist about this when the problem is much greater than the solution.

It's as if at the start of WWII politicians started saying, well, people won't tolerate being conscripted and having rationing, we might as well do nothing.

Incidentally, I've heard wishes for breakthroughs in clean energy tech for decades, and we've since had major advances in things like solar, wind and batteries. We can hope for more advances in the coming years but we shouldn't bank on it - we have the technology already to tackle the problem.

The examples you are giving are examples of short term sacrifices.

However, take a look at the UK post WWII. Winston Churchill got voted out of office. The big thing people wanted was a return to normalcy and the way things had been before.

On the contrary, Atlee won the 1945 election on a platform of radical social reform: national healthcare, social security, and state-funded education.

Normalcy as in voting in socialists?

> Although ostensibly this has been enforced, in reality it is impossible to police and has almost entirely been done voluntarily, through persuasion, and with much popular support.

I think the terrifying prospect of catching and spreading a virus was the greatest factor, having seen it spread elsewhere.

Also our compliance hasn't come out of nowhere. I feel we've become ever more subservient and unquestioning over the last 19 years. Barely anyone refers to the legislation (some of which is quite easy to read), but instead Government "rules". A worrying trend.

Been a lot longer than 19 years, before 911 we had the Troubles and the Soviets as a convenient fig leaf to hide all sorts of justification behind.

This may be true for adults. The key is to teach children the proper methods so that when they grow up, being conservative will be natural.

It isn’t true. There isn’t any shortage of renewable energy sources, there’s just a cost of switching to them (and companies and states that depends on the income from the fossil fuels that resist the change).

Even at this stage of development, the electricity needs of the US could be met by wind and solar. It would be extremely expensive, but it could be done.

Oh yes, without any problems. And the cost shouldn't be exaggerated, in particular compared with the costs of doing nothing at all to reduce CO2 emissions.

You are aware that a shower every week or even clean water for consumption is _not_ available for 30% of "humanity": https://ourworldindata.org/water-access

I am not sure, how "I am gonna give you clean water and one shower a week" is a loosing stance with these people. Granted they are not the typical voters relevant in gerrymandering and co, but they are humans - and since we alle strive for global democracy instead of neocolonialism and imperialism and killing the poor (aren't we?), these people are a significant proportion of humanity.

Many people have a hard life(lack of food, clean water, decent shelder, education etc) and many other people don't care. This happens at a very local level(i.e people living on the same street or even in the same building) let alone globally. It happens even between relatives. That 88" TV in my living room is definitely a better proposition than sending the money to some poor people. The communist system promised economic equality and we've seen how it ended-up. I believe that instead of cutting off shower time we should invest more in technology. Make the oil companies pay for for this transition.

the communist systems so far were mostly autocratic and yeah, most of them were not worse after a transition period than the previous autocrats and provided far more social mobility and care for poor people than a lot of other systems... I'm not sure how you mentioning an 88" TV helps for anything but blaring out you're a far-right bigot.

Btw: making the oil-companies pay at this point means no dividends from them immediately and them eventually folding very fast - how do you propose they pay for that transition then (especially with most of past dividends safely stored awy in trusts on Panama)? You could always tax fortunes I guess...

Humans make voluntary uncomfortable changes to their way of life all the time. They move to other countries / cities, break up and form new relationships, quit or pick up religion, become vegan, move to cabins from cities or vice versa, start families, volunteer to fight in wars etc etc. Whether the changes perceived as voluntary or not is highly subjective.

Shortening you shower time can feel like too small a change to feel like a meaningful, if anything.

>> "Humans make voluntary uncomfortable changes to their way of life all the time"

--- hoping their life will eventually improve(i.e work hard, make more money, then move to a nice neighbourhood where you can enjoy the fruits of your hard work). The religious people hope for a better life in heaven and so on. What's the incentive to for a worse showering experience? What do you get in return?

Obviously the fight against climate change and saving untold billions of people from misery and death not to mention the rest of the biosphere. And everything that comes with that (like feeling better about yourself and the social/psychgological benefits from being part of a movement for good).

Monetary savings would probably be the main motivator for most people. Being seen as virtuous is also a huge motivating factor. That kind of shower being installed by default in hotels, rental properties, and new construction puts a tiny barrier to people being motivated enough to switch.

I don’t know about those who volunteer to fight in wars but I’m pretty confident that people become vegans/environmentalists when the social benefits outweigh the costs of doing so. It’s not a coincidence that veganism and environmentalism cluster around left wing ideologies.

For a right wing person in a right wing area to become a vegan would have a social cost, not a social benefit, and thus is much less likely to happen.

The reaction against the shutdowns in the US have made me realize this is 100% correct.

We can’t even address an actual situation happening this minute. We have no chance of finding the political will to address something where the consequences are years or decades away if it means asking people to do without.

There are many more countries around the world and most got on just fine with the shutdowns, lockdowns, and reduction in services.

The threat of potential death within 2 weeks probably contributed to this. And after a few weeks people were getting antsy and screaming the need to go back to normal they assumed they'd get after 2-3 weeks of lockdown...

Absolutely, and as with the Paris accord and every other attempt at taking action, the United States was the odd one out.

Our culture is a unique mixture of “you can’t tell me what to do” independence and “let me speak with the manager” entitlement.

It powers a lot of the great things about the United States, but also makes it hard to accomplish anything requiring doing without.

Tangent: I appreciate what they are doing with their solar-powered server, but they could make the site so much easier to read by removing the whole-page overlay to be something less obnoxious and irritating to read when half the page is yellow and half is not.

Perhaps a thing to let you "minimise" it so it only takes up a 1cm bar on the side, or a thing to just let you dismiss/hide it entirely?

Also for the image dithering, it kinda feels like they've gone too far with that - I guess it is a stylistic thing to have huge huge huge dithered images that at best don't fit on a single screen at once or at worst require you to scroll past 2 or 3 screen heights worth (e.g. "A 6-nozzle mist shower" one), yet with a resolution so low you can't actually read the text (NASA image)?

In my opinion it would be better to have higher resolution dithered images, that are just physically smaller and fit on one screen (I am using a 1920x1080 1x1-DPI so not exactly huge by modern standards but not tiny) so that the file-size balances out.

I found the article really hard to read due to the 50/50 yellow-not yellow and the absurdly large low-res pictures that I needed to scroll to see the entire thing but actually cant see because the resolution is so poor. Sorry. :(

I actually enjoyed the overlay and the image format.

There’s one aspect about the energy use of warm water that this article glosses over: warm water is particularly easy to store. Heat is also a byproduct of many industrial processes- reusing and storing that heat or warming up your boiler at peak energy production time is an efficient way to make use of “waste” energy. This significantly reduces the effective energy usage of any warm water usage.

There’s also ways to efficiently turn electricity into heat - heat pumps for example. These “produce” around 3-4 joule of usable heat per joule of electric energy. Just using a heat pump instead of an electric heater cuts the mentioned energy costs to a quarter.

Maybe electric cars will bring in the days of home CHP. The combination of a natural gas combustion engine with a good use for the waste heat can be circa 90% efficient.

Solar hot water panels are also pretty effective. You get water hot enough for showering even on cloudy days here in the UK.

In countries with a lot of suntime, it can be as simple as a black tank/radiator outside. 3-6 months of free hot water with absolutely minimal investment.

Here in Germany we commonly have negative electricity prices at exchanges and with a increasingly higher percentage of renewable energy is will only become more common.

It would be very easy to use the energy to heat up warm water in the already existing warm water boilers just by adding a cheap electric heating element to the usual gas burner. The necessary smart meters for billing are actually mandatory in new installations. However with current consumer electricity prices completely removed from the large scale exchanges and more expensive than ever I don't see that happening right now.

One problem that article does not address is that mist showers with warm water seem like a perfect recipe for breeding Legionnaire Disease, a very dangerous and deadly form of pneumonia. This is especially true if you store the water in a warm state for longer times rather than heating it on the fly. Unless this problem is addressed, mist showers are not a good idea.

We can solve this problem already with tankless water heaters.

The article mentions this and has a link at the end to very detailed precautions to avoid legionella bacteria in water systems.

Sorry, I overlooked that passage. The link is in the last paragraph, after the main article. Should have read it more carefully. Anyway, it's a problem.

You can get a sufficient amount of hot water for all your family's daily shower out of 3m² of thermal solar panels. no fossil energy necessary.

Water isn't scarce in many parts of the world, and domestic use is most often negligible anyways.

Cool tech though, will have to investigate the local wife-acceptance-factor

The last line resonates with me. It helps if you have a second bathroom with which to test.

> The Carbon Footprint of the Daily Shower

Nuclear power plants have zero carbon footprint. Let’s build them instead of reducing quality of life.

This site only seems to be interested in solutions that seem to utterly degrade humans, like eliminating showers and travel, or eating worms.

I don't think that's the case. I think a lot of people here just realize that nuclear plants are expensive. It's 1 to 5 billion optimistically for the new designs provided you don't have any taxes or regulations at all. It's multiple times more for designs that we actually have experience with. If the government wanted to build some, at government expense, I'd be all for it. That said, I'm not at all surprised that no private energy investment groups have put their money on the table for nuclear. (Especially after the financial disaster that is Vogtie).

Nuclear really is just too expensive right now, and therefore too risky, for many of the energy players in the private sector. Again, if the government was to shoulder the majority of that risk, I think you might have some takers maybe? But as it stands? No way.

I'll even go so far as to say that if the nuclear supporters on HN were the energy billionaires, I'd give good odds that they wouldn't put their money on nuclear either. Even if you spotted them a no tax and no regulation environment. The nuclear supporters on HN would still wait for government help in the same manner as the big energy players today.

Those are fixed per-plant overhead costs, though.

If you need twice as much power, then rather than building twice as many nuclear plants, you can just build one plant far less than twice as big, to output twice as much energy. (I believe it scales logarithmically, actually.)

Spreading nuclear energy is costly (insofar as you eventually need to build more plants, because no power grid is 100% lossless over long distances); but scaling nuclear power in response to densification of urban areas is cheap (as long as you do it in advance.)

The problem is that, in places where it’d make a lot of sense to just plop down a nuclear plant, there’s either heavy existing investment into e.g. coal; or the nearby area is as yet too small to “pay back” the costs of nuclear investment.

Really, what nuclear power fits hand-in-glove with, is centralized urban regional planning (i.e. planning a large global city 50 years in advance.) But hardly anyone does that. Even the USSR didn’t do that.

There’s one region that is doing top-down regional planning right now: Dubai. But, ah, they don’t need the energy.

(Though that raises an interesting point: a large uranium deposit could be exploited on the global market in a very similar way to a large oil deposit, if a country so desired. Harvest the electricity locally with nuclear plants; create some fuel out of it [hydrogen? ethanol?]; and sell+ship the resulting fuel globally. There could totally be a “nuclear Dubai” built on the resulting resource-extraction economy.)

The EPRs under consturction fraught with cost overruns and huge delays (some started 15 construction years ago) are evidence that big reactors in the real world are not very economical.

You get those very same cost overruns and huge delays in smaller reactors (at least, as long as you're building on the same fundamental technologies.) You can build cheaper by building e.g. a Thorium breeder reactor, but that just defers the problem of project management—building a thousand Thorium plants, like building a wind-farm with 1000 windmills, is still fraught with bureaucratic principal-agent problems.

Really, the problem isn't any specific technology, but rather the fact that any industry where projects cost a billion dollars apiece, is going to result in a natural monopoly/oligopoly, which creates perverse incentives.

The renewable energy sources you think of when you think of "renewable energy", aren't lower-overhead because of what's required to build them. They're lower-overhead because they're often built/sold as individual interchangable units that can be purchased on the open market at different times from many different companies; which creates an efficient, liquid market for such devices.

Contrast with e.g. a hydro dam. Hydro power is also renewable energy! But a dam is just as large an infrastructure project as a nuclear plant; and so dam-builders and dam-buyers form just as small a market; and so said market is just as fraught with cronyist back-room dealings; and so the market ends up just as inefficient as nuclear, or coal, or oil-and-gas, or any other cartel-driven business.

I'm not sure if we are reading the same sources. The smaller ~1 GW BWR projects (using eg VVER-1000) have been completed with much smaller delays and overruns in recent years, with construction start to operation times around 5 years.

> no power grid is 100% lossless over long distances

Power loss is actually just around 5% per 1000km. So if electricity is made twice as cheap it can be transferred virtually anywhere in the US from a single point in today’s price (of course we won’t build a single power plant, that’s just an illustration of the fact that transmission cost is not prohibitively high).

The US (and/or China, Russia, and Canada) are bad examples, because most countries are not nearly as large, and most countries want some measure of "ensured by our own hand" electrical-grid independence/fault-tolerance (even though they share a power-grid with their neighbours), just like most countries want a standing border-defence force (even if they participate in a defence alliance.)

So what you'd get in practice, in a nuclear-first world, is O(K log N) power plants: i.e., log(N) plants per country, for each of K≥195 countries.

The world already operates more than 195 nuclear power plants.

My semi off-grid cabin has no well so I haul water. Showering is by far the biggest consumer, though I use a composting toilet so there's no flushing to compete with.

Having to literally carry every gallon used has completely restructured my relationship with water.

It feels very wrong to use a flush toilet now. What an obscene thing to do with potable water, especially in a drought-stricken place like California.

Mist showers aren’t very comfortable. I personally enjoy high flow showers. I’d rather see water usage cut at golf courses and other industrial uses. We as humans shouldn’t deprive ourself first, only as a last resort.

> I personally enjoy high flow showers.

Me, too, I feel kind of addicted actually. One change that I have noticed is that it must be about two decades since I last owned a washcloth. I wonder if they had been part of the customary hotel bathroom set back then or were they considered part of what the first would bring?

As a high-flow addict what I'd really love to have is a closed loop shower, because what I certainly don't need is drinking water quality the entire time. Use fresh water only at the beginning until the loop is filled (perhaps manually or automatically omitting recapture of the first few tens of seconds of the initial flow, for when you come in really dirty), then cycle for as long as you want, then again fresh water for a final rinse. Bonus points for a button to purge/refill mid-shower if you want it a bit cleaner.

I consider this concept one of those good things that is threatened by the perfect (expecting people to shower less or downgrade to mist-showers or washcloths)

In a lot of places in the world fresh water is not an issue and a higher rate of usage actually helps with sewer systems and prevents them from clogging.

However recovering the waste heat from a shower, e.g. by running the drain water trough a heat exchanger with the freshwater would already help saving a lot of energy.

Indeed, my main issue with my shower is "why tf doesn't this thing have some heat recovery". But that wouldn't be considered an alternative to more radical solutions like a mist shower in the same way a water cycle would.

In warmer climates you can capture waste heat from your a/c and heat water at the cost of running a small recirculating pump.

I'm intrigued, but I honestly don't understand how they rinse effectively.

On the one hand, the article explains how a Navy shower uses a 30-second rinse, which feels like how long I need to rinse for to get all the soap and shampoo off.

But then the article says "a mist shower of 8.9 minutes offers plenty of time to get rid of soap and shampoo".

Huh? If it takes me two minutes to lather up, am I spending 7 minutes just waiting for enough mist to gradually collect to rinse? That sounds... horribly inefficient and just bad design generally.

(It also admits it won't work for people who need to rinse long hair, so statistically this seems very male-centric.)

I'd much rather just get it done with in 30 seconds. In fact, I can't see any benefits over a Navy shower at all here, only drawbacks. Am I missing something?

I think the benefit over a navy shower is that you still have some warm water while you're lathering so you don't get cold. I can imagine a hybrid approach where you switch to full flow just for rinsing.

I think the is one of the easiest personal ways to reduce consumption. I challenged myself and have recently completed 2 years of no "continuous" showers.

Instead, I sit in my empty bathtub and use the spray only for getting wet enough to soap up and rinsing off. In between, all my lathering and scrubbing is done with the spray off.

As a person who loves long hot showers, this initially took some getting used to, but now it is my daily routine.

What if you also drop the soap, that way you need even less water.

I'm not trolling by the way, I believe soap mostly isn't necessary. I'm interested in why everyone uses it when they take a shower.

I need to put on sun-cream to go outside in the current weather, and washing it off again with soap in the evening makes me feel a lot less hot and sticky than just a rinse and towel.

People who don't use soap generally smell worse to those that do.

I don’t smell after showering either with or without soap. This state only lasts a very short while in either case unless I apply deodorant. So soap really does nothing for me smell wise.

Most people who smell bad don’t realize they do.

I came to the same conclusion years ago. I use soap when handwashing and on my rear end, but that's about it. I don't smell, and my skin and hair is not oily after a shower, at all.

Within this context: "drain water heat recovery unit" for a Google search. Upcoming building codes within Europe might make this common I believe.

Our water systems are just boneheaded, the indoor outhouse was only invented yesterday!

Here in San Francisco, our water comes from Hetch Hetchy[1][2] two hundred miles away. You turn on the tap, it flows into the drain and away again, to a processing plant and then, I think, the Pacific Ocean. That is objectively insane.

A less insane system would capture and store water on the way in and the way out, keep some of it in a large (house-sized) tank at ~120°F (storing low-grade thermal energy, typically waste heat from other systems plus solar) and feed the showers through a small continuous-flow heater (JIT heating). Waste water from the shower can go right into the garden if you use the right soap.

(Lavender flowers work great as soap. "Its late Latin name was lavandārius, from lavanda (things to be washed), from the verb lavāre (to wash)."[3] The English word "lave" is of the same root.)

I lived off-grid in the woods for a time and we had long-as-you-like hot showers. That's half the benefit of civilization right there in the bathroom! Just think things through and yu can have a high standard of living without the ridiculous waste.

It's fun, cheap, and easy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hetch_Hetchy

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O'Shaughnessy_Dam_(California)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavandula

Were the energy calculations in the article done under the assumption of “all humans” living in single-family homes with their own water boilers? Because hot water has economies of scale (oddly enough, in pretty much the same ways that cloud-compute does.) If most of the world lives in apartments (or even just townhouses served by large shared central boilers with well-insulated underground hot-water plumbing), I suspect the energy calculation works out a lot differently.

Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21535380

I have this showerhead that has a mist setting: https://cirrus-shower.com/ (I didn't buy the "aromatherapy" add-on stuff). It's good, but water flow is indeed a problem, and my heater switches off mid-shower when the showerhead is on the finest setting and uses the least amount of water.

As is, this seems utterly useless for rinsing hair (particularly long hair), and it’s difficult to see how it can achieve broad adoption with this flaw. If there was a pushbutton that would turn on a “high flow” nozzle for 30 seconds at a time for hair-rinsing purposes, it would be much more functional.

My first thought was "that needs a high pressure pump" haha, which would kind of defeat the purpose. Probably still way less water usage though.

If we can’t even make a regular shower sustainable, then our civilisation is fucked.

Next month: how to enjoy your weekly sponge bath!

"This is a solar-powered website, which means it sometimes goes offline"

yeah, welcome to the future.

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