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

Mist Showers: Sustainable Decadence? (2019)

resilience.org

32 pointsxvilka56 comments

I live in Ukraine, where yesterday the water (and central heating) was cut off due to missile strikes. But as a Muslim, we are religiously recommended to take a ritual bath on Friday. So I took a "shower" the way it was described in our medieval religious textbooks[1], from a store of cold bottled water, using a total of about 5 litres. Simply pour over oneself with a small jug, 3 times over the head, and a couple times over the right and left shoulder, thoroughly rubbing with one's hand over the entire body after each pour.

Though cold, it was extremely and thoroughly refreshing (and different from a simple cold shower). Highly recommend you try it once, the shower-from-a-small-bucket method, that campers and other outdoors people are used to when dealing with limited supplies of cold water. After it was over, I remember thinking to myself, this isn't too bad, I could live like this if I had to.

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

Your fortitude is admirable. Please stay safe.

I have to say, the author's approach to showering is very Calvinist. People are enjoying showers too much and too often!

While I understand their concerns around energy usage, the focus and on water usage (or implied "wastage") feels, to me who lives in a very different country, rather odd.

That water isn't destroyed, it'll be back eventually, assuming we're not consuming fossil water.

It's definitely good to reduce excessive water usage, just from an infrastructure and sustainable water take POV, but this reminds me of the concerted media effort around climate change to make it the individual consumer's responsibility to reduce emissions, taking the focus away from the corporations whose profit has always come with an atmospheric externality...

In other words, if you want to save water in Die Niederlande, look at industrial/agricultural usage first, showers third, after "let's maintain pipes to minimise leaks".

I agree. People need relaxation, recreation, etc. It's much healthier if it's a longer shower or something similar than say, drugs or smoking (unless if your burning your skin in the shower- then you could potentially be triggering cancer)

I'm Dutch. The notion of water shortages in that country is ridiculous. There's plenty of water. There is a shortage of ground water that is being used for a lot of things including intensive agriculture and drinking water. Ground water is nice because it is there and typically very clean so you don't need to do a lot of filtering before you can use it. However, using ground water at the current rate is not sustainable because we are depleting it at a rate that is higher than it is being topped up by nature. But there's plenty of other water: rivers, lakes, etc. We actually spend lots of energy pumping water out to sea to keep the land dry. Perfectly good fresh water that we have way too much off. Way more than we will ever need. The reason people are trying to get consumers to save water in the Netherlands is very simple: it's cheaper than making the necessary investments to scale up water production.

Cleaning up water takes a bit of energy and so does heating it up. So yes, it has a price. However, we know how get clean energy now. So, that's a solvable problem. And it's not that expensive even. High gas prices are currently causing people to think very hard about how to upgrade their houses. The real money savings are house heating. My parents switched off their gas heating system a few weeks ago after being faced with 1000 euro monthly gas bills. Only a fraction of that is showers. It's a recently renovated house that is pretty well insulated. The issue is simply that gas is really expensive now. Luckily, they have a wood pallet stove. Also not cheap to run but a lot cheaper. The real solution for them will be a heat pump and some access to renewable power. And the financial incentives for that are there now in the form of high gas prices.

> That water isn't destroyed, it'll be back eventually, assuming we're not consuming fossil water.

I agree. But I'd add that the idea of a mist shower is great if you are doing something off-grid or boondocking in a camper, where every gallon counts.

There are plenty of low-hanging fruit to pick before we get to reducing showering, one instance being home insulation.

Meanwhile in places with district heating water is commonly heated via combined heat and power plants, making the carbon point somewhat moot.

Of course in a fully-renewable scenario there would be no steam plant to provide heat, but here's where nuclear enters the picture.

As for water: food has orders of magnitude higher water requirements. Granted, it's not the same standard, but at the same time you can't just pour whatever on your crops. Some treatment is always required.

https://www.eniscuola.net/en/mediateca/water-footprint-of-fo...

Recommend the book Beyond Soap, written by a professor and clinical dermatologist, on how we're 'too clean', especially with regards to applying unnecessary chemicals on our skin:

> Sensitive skin is one of the most buzzed-about topics in dermatology today. It can be painful, debilitating, and inconvenient. Astonishingly, many of the women and men who suffer from problem skin are unknowingly causing it by washing too frequently and using too many skincare and beauty products. Often, we slather ourselves in creams and balms that can actually damage the skin. The miracle products we buy at department stores, specialty shops, and pharmacies have the potential to make us less attractive and prematurely age our skin.

> In Beyond Soap, leading dermatologist Dr. Skotnicki explains that the best state for skin is the natural state. On its own, the skin is better equipped to fight wrinkles, stave off aging and act as armor that protects the body from infection. Every time we slather, spread, hydrate, or soften the skin, we nudge the skin away from its healthiest natural condition. Skotnicki demystifies the claims of commonly used beauty products and offers a common-sense approach to cleansing the body along with her product-elimination diet that has helped thousands of patients suffering from a wide array of skin conditions, and a skincare regime that will help you maintain skin health, fight aging, and keep your skin reaction-free forever.

* https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/35733533-beyond-soap

* https://drsandyskotnicki.com/dr-sandy-skotnicki/

her product-elimination diet

Surely you perceive how full of shit that sounds.

I read the book (judging by your low-effort snark, you did not) and found it quite useful.

For those that like to read, the book has quite a few ways to reduce and change your hygiene regimen and figure out if you're having reactions to certain products. A bit dry, but definitely made me want to switch to soaps/shampoos/etc with minimal scents and additives.

Iatrogenics is a term when a treatment causes more harm than good, and often because people want to do “something” you end up in a state where you’re using all manner of things that might be bad for your health.

I don’t see what’s wrong with a “product elimination diet” at all.

> Surely you perceive how full of shit that sounds.

It's no different than when you have issues with food:

> An elimination diet involves removing foods from your diet that you suspect your body can’t tolerate well. The foods are later reintroduced, one at a time, while you look for symptoms that show a reaction.

* https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/elimination-diet

You either 'go to zero' and start introducing one new element/variable at a time to see what is causing you issues, or you start at the status quo and remove one variable at a time. It's a controlled 'experiment' on yourself.

And given that she has a private practice, lectures at the University of Toronto, and is associated with a major hospital (which a Level 1 trauma centre), she's hardly some quack.

I think this is an attempt at humor.

I stopped using soap and shampoo in the shower years ago. If I'm really dirty I'll use soap--I'm not a barbarian. But in general, yeah, the skin's natural oil remains if you just take a hot shower with no soap, and, at least for me, no-one complains about BO (in fact the opposite!). I feel clean, smell clean. Interestingly, this really helped my dandruff - just rubbing the scalp with hot water completely stopped it far better than any shampoo.

> this really helped my dandruff - just rubbing the scalp with hot water completely stopped it far better than any shampoo.

It helped for a few years for me, then it came back. Only head&shoulders helps (it disappears for a whole day or 2); no other shampoo does anything but make it worse.

Interesting that something could work for years, and then stop working. I feel that has to be an important clue as to what's causing the dandruff in the first place. Note that it stayed gone in my case, so YMMV.

> Heating 76.5 litres of water (8.9 minutes x 8.6 litres per minute) from 18 to 38 degrees Celsius requires 2.1 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy.

In late September this year 2022 my region was hit by a hurricane. My power mine was off for 10 days. Of all the things that I missed it was my daily shower.

I have a butane camp stove and used it to heat water it's actually very good much better than my electric stove. I also bought a 3kW generator and an electric kettle.

My plan was on day 8 to have a bath so I filled the tub just a bit to save on effort. And then I heated water in a pot on the stove and in the kettle. I did that over and over many times but I could only get the water from 13C to 20C in an hour and a half. I just sat in the water and had a "bird bath" but even that was incredibly cold to the point my muscles ached.

From that experience I can certainly appreciate the amount of energy it takes to heat up even a small amount of water.

What’s with the “water spending” numbers here? It’s not like the water in shower gets “used up”.

Your meter counts 50 liters, but that’s not 50 liters of precious water supply permanently removed from the planet.

The issue is that capturing, storing and distributing potable water is very expensive and difficult in many regions. Famously much of Australia struggles often with not having sufficient fresh water during droughts. Yet we have it easy compared to many areas of developing countries.

Mist is a very poor way to deliver heat energy. It may be more efficient for delivering wetness, but any heat you put into tiny water particles is lost to the air before the droplet reaches your body.

To save water and energy, the Shower Loop appears to be a much better solution: https://showerloop.cc/

Ha. Like a dishwasher's recirculation.

I like the loop idea. I imagine some people would find it unhygienic but it is no worse than a bath.

What about if you separated the heat from the wetness? Deliver heat with a lamp and leave the water colder? I wonder whether it would be a nice experience or not.

maybe even separate heat from polar solvents from nonpolar solvents? (ok, the last separation would make recirculation difficult, unless they're miscible)

Whatever happened to using the hot shower waste water to heat up the incoming cold water? People used to talk about it all the time, and I'm planning on implementing it when I remodel my bathroom.

I do a lot to reduce my carbon footprint already, so giving up my daily 5-10 minute hot shower is going to be towards the end of my list when it comes to reducing further.

Living in the North East US, we have plenty of water here and shortages have never been an issue. If we can stop growing water-hungry crops in the desert there will be plenty of water to go around.

Moving to hybrid solar/electric or solar/gas water heating is the next logical step. Direct solar heating of water works very well.

Mist showers would need to use distilled water to prevent lung damage from breathing in hard water minerals.

This is why thermal humidifiers can be air-safer than ultrasonic humidifiers (unless using distilled water).

I got rid of all of my ultrasonic humidifiers for this reason. Ultrasonic throws up all sorts of PM2.5 particles which are bad to breathe in. Boiling your water has no such potentially dangerous drawbacks.

Venta humidifiers are a good alternative as well.

Is there risk of parasites too?

FWIW it's not unlikely you'll breathe in some when using normal shower too, but mist certainly more concerning.

>Mist showers would need to use distilled water to prevent lung damage from breathing in hard water minerals.

Unless you have a source for this, it sounds like some strong "programmer medicine".

The lungs have cilia, mucus, and leukocytes that can remove impressive amounts of contaminants (like coal dust or tar from smoking) before it starts becoming a problem, so it's hard to believe hard water mist for less than an hour per day poses any risk. Your showerhead/water being contaminated with Legionella would though.

I just cannot sign up for this vision of the future where people are eating plant protein meat and never cooking on an open flame and avoiding now… hot showers?

No thanks. Hard pass. This is all terrible.

The autor has a nice article about not enough fires:

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/12/too-much-combustio...

I’ve just given up on the guilt. I live near one of the largest rivers in the world. I’m surrounded by the most fertile farmland in the world. These may be problems for people that live in places that in retrospect aren’t great for human habitation, but not here.

I think I’m going to buy myself a shower head with a removable water regulator for Christmas. I spent two weeks in hotels and my home shower feels terrible in comparison to that water pressure. Why do the hotels get to have objectively better showers than I do?

My favorite is the line “there is not enough grazing land in the world for people to eat as much meat as Americans and Europeans do”

Well, there does seem to be enough land for the American and European cows. Other places will eat other things. Like they always have.

There aren't enough people in Australia for us all to eat the meat we produce.

In 2019, Australia exported 76% of its total beef and veal production

https://www.mla.com.au/about-mla/the-red-meat-industry/

> No thanks. Hard pass. This is all terrible.

Of course it sounds terrible, but is it more or less terrible than the collapse of civilization, which is what seems likely to happen as a result of climate instability and radical ecological changes, should we continue on our present course?

"Hard pass" is a choice for the latter.

To me, no meat and cold showers is the collapse of civilization. Or at the very least, the start of it.

I usually take about 3-4 minutes to shower but when I shower I want PLENTY of HOT water. You may claim these mist showers provide the same comfort but I'm just not buying it.

The constant legal push for water saving armatures in showers is something that bothers me to no end. Especially since I live in Norway where we're neither lacking water nor renewable electricity.

> Why Do We Shower?

Get itchy fecal matter off behind & not have to mess with aiming bidet wand spraying maybe fecal water outside bowl or mess with a rag with fecal chunks.

> Each day, many of us pour roughly 70 litres of hot water over our bodies in order to be “clean”.

That seems like an odd use of scare quotes. Is the implication that showers don't actually clean you?

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

>The shower doesn’t get much attention in the context of climate change. However, like airplanes, cars, and heating systems, it has become a very wasteful and carbon-intensive way to provide for a basic need: washing the body. Each day, many of us pour roughly 70 litres of hot water over our bodies in order to be “clean”.

this is your brain on energy austerity. someone tell the author about this little thing called uranium fission.

also what's with the scare-quotes around "clean"?

>In principle, the energy for a shower could be generated by renewable energy sources. However, if eight billion people were to shower daily, total energy use per year would be 6,132 terawatt-hours (TWh). This is eight times the energy produced by wind turbines worldwide in 2017 (745 TWh). All (current) wind turbines in the world could provide only 1 billion people with a “sustainable” daily shower. Furthermore, the use of renewable energy sources doesn’t lower the water use of the daily shower. To be clear, renewable energy is part of the solution – solar boilers, biomass, heat generating windmills – but we also need to look at the demand side of washing in a post-carbon world.

lmao, saying the quiet part out loud. spend trillions on global energiewende, and we can't shower once we get to the promised land.

>A nine minute hot shower per day is by no means a basic necessity: it’s a treat.

eat shit.

this is what they want: the whole world locked into a permanently sub-21st century standard of living. renewables don't scale, so their ideology has to tell you it's a good thing to be poor, and that enjoying a hot shower is a sign of wickedness. no "treats" for bad pets.

all the wonders of modernity happened because we figured out how to harness exponentially more energy per capita, first by coal, then by oil, then by fission. one day, God willing, we'll jump to fusion. but if the Devil gets his way and we let the degrowthers flatten the curve: that's it. our standard of living hits a ceiling and stays there forever. that's what they really mean by "sustainability".

We never transcended oil for fission as we did for coal. Our way of life is still riding a glut of fossil fuel use. This probably won’t matter in my lifetime, but that energy glut is not infinite - and we still need fossil fuels to produce that ‘renewable’ and fission equipment.

>We never transcended oil for fission as we did for coal.

that was a political choice, not practical.

Political vs practical fission stagnation is a perennial HN debate.

Yeah so remember don’t shower for nine minutes while the glass factory down the road offsets your entire towns carbon footprint for its lifespan in a single day.

If you want to eat the bugs, do it; but on behalf of everyone who wants to take a bath, it’s not our problem. These countries have fission, they refuse to use it, and their interest groups guilt trip you into 19th century standards of living.

Luh-mao, is all I have to say to that.

I think you’ve misread my “we need fossil fuels/fission isn’t a slam dunk” comment.

Showers not until the 1970s? Maybe in the Netherlands. In the US, I understand it was common by the late 1950s.

The author seems to neglect that heat from the water like the water itself can and should be recycled.

Ideally, taking a hot bath or a long shower should just be a different form of heating your apartment or house. The same way your refrigerator or your kettle should contribute to the room temperature. If we then also generate heat with heatpumps or solar power (or both), I don't see any reason to not indulge in long showers.

I guess leaving the water in the tub is an easy way to reclaim the heat, but is there any place where the same is done to shower water (or all waste water) on a large scale? Maybe arctic research stations?

The warm bathwater humidity will make your walls moldy!

Or help save additional energy otherwise expended on an air humidifier...

IMO if you have heat pump water heater, recycling dirty water would be good albeit complex way to reclaim the heat.

Many people find long hot showers relaxing.

Mental health is more important than conserving "scarce resources" like water and energy. The ocean is literally full of water. The sun is very bright. Research will eventually help us make better use of these "scarce resources" without burning (gasp!) any fossil fuels.

Until then, I'm going to continue enjoying my 20-minute daily routine.

But thanks for caring.

I am seeing way too many of these odd comments. If you're not interested in reducing your carbon footprint right now by reducing the energy necessary to pump, clean, and heat your bathing water you can keep that to yourself. Did you read the article? It's not trying to guilt trip you yet you react as if you've been personally attacked. This article is probably more for people like me who feel guilty showering daily due the relative lack of necessity compared to the environmental impact. Green energy isn't carbon neutral, just better than the alternatives and doesn't have a net zero impact. If you're saying we shouldn't worry about our energy production's environmental impact because eventually fusion will become reality, there is a long mean-time where our personal choices are still disruptive to the environment. I'd gladly introduce this type of system if I can do so with a reliable commercial product or a diy I could figure out. So this article is for people like me, people who'd also rather not have to wade through negative comments and actually get to the useful ones faster.

Exactly. Neurotic people trying to impose their rules on people to reinforce their own energy-apocalypse ideology.

Split the atom.

No thanks - I think I’ll stick with my three hour power shower at maximum heat.

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