Opinion: Your shower head is lying to you about pressure
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Highly recommend the Speakman brand of low-flow, high pressure shower heads. I learned of the brand while staying in a hotel that had a fantastic shower (compared to what I was used to) and bought a similar model immediately.
I live in CA where my apartment has mandatory low flow, and I replaced the cheap 2.5gpm shower head with an even lower-flow 1.75gpm high pressure head and it was night and day better.
When visiting my family in western NY suburbs, they have all high flow but low pressure shower heads, and it’s just not a very effective or satisfying shower after getting used to our shower head.
My counter recommendation is to grab a pair of needle nose pliers, take apart your shower head, find the blue plastic flow limiter, and yank it out. Or if you rent, buy a new showerhead and take it apart instead.
Any model with Delta's H2Okinetic system should work. The flow is amplified without increasing the pressure of individual water droplets. It feels like a "rain shower."
https://kk.org/cooltools/delta-water-amplifying-showerheads/
With your water pressure, the Delta could very well hit two rooms away! (I'm not sure how the Delta scales with water pressure...)
I actually was going to do this when I bought my new shower head! I assumed that’s what the hotels do. But nope, I was satisfied without this. It might also just be that the flow in my apartment is lower regardless of fixture, which is why I opted for a shower head designed for low flow in the first place.
It makes you realize a low flow/high pressure shower head is a just a bunch of little needle jets that neither feel good nor adequately cover you in a deluge of water. While better than low flow/low pressure shower heads, they are still a joke.
This is the mark of a mediocre shower head.
There’s something about Speakman shower heads that spread the individual streams in a much more satisfying way. They’re adjustable in a flexible/continuous manner, which may have something to do with it.
As for the “deluge” - you’d be surprised how well ~2gpm can rinse with the right application of pressure/spread. Maybe I’m just not as sensitive to having a few square inches of my body not covered in sheets of water? I don’t need to be luxuriated with a veritable waterfall every day.
All of us can have high flow showers and toilets like we used to. The world isn’t going to end if we do. Even regions that have water shortages can solve them with technology that’s existed for the better part of a century by now. But if we do that, we will end up standing in our hot, high-flow showers thinking to ourselves—this is wrong, we don’t deserve this, this is too good to be true.
If building things was an option in California, they could just use nuclear power to desalinate water from the Pacific, but let’s be realistic.
Do you throw your junk on a street if the street is already dirty ?
It’s not because others don’t care that it’s an excuse to act like them.
Your analogy doesn't work because this has been made easy by trash cans and the effect is immediate, local, and advantageous to yourself vs water conservation which requires sacrifice and water use itself is not inherently bad, it's the results of aggregating lots of water use together that can be bad.
industrial resource use is to indirectly fulfill individual demand. Recycling might be a sham but reducing individual consumption would make a difference.
(But we need a deposit on cigarette butts..)
Amusingly Ireland recently implemented a half-assed version of the same thing, but the bottles are flimsy and must be in perfect condition upon return. The machine (if it works) just gives vouchers for whatever supermarket has placed it in their car park, and the charges are stupid (tiny cans of tonic have a deposit as high as the original price).
(I didn’t work in a paper mill but have family who has and I’ve been to them plenty of times to ask questions of the engineers)
In the year before we used 76 units of water, in the year after we used 78. So maybe it increased our total usage by 2.6%; but there were also some other lifestyle changes over that period that I'd expect drove up our water usage more.
Even if all 2.6% could be attributed to the flow restrictor, its not enough for me to go back to crappy showers.
Yet I drive by our large lakes and the system of agricultural aqueducts weekly and see the millions of gallons of water being pulled to grow crops that aren't even well-suited to the local climate (but which are more profitable). I guess making life a little bit more annoying for tens of millions of consumers, who don't have lobbyists in the capitol, is an easy way for politicians to virtual signal "doing something" for the environment while still collecting that sweet PAC money from the agri-lobby.
What does "used" mean in this case? Aren't these closed systems?
Other heat sink strategies could involve refrigeration systems, but those are significantly more energy intensive and a lot more complex.
The water still exists yes, but ground water is essentially “used up.”
"When water used as a coolant is returned to the natural environment at a higher temperature, the sudden change in temperature decreases oxygen supply and affects ecosystem composition. Fish and other organisms adapted to particular temperature range can be killed by an abrupt change in water temperature (either a rapid increase or decrease) known as "thermal shock". Warm coolant water can also have long term effects on water temperature, increasing the overall temperature of water bodies, including deep water. Seasonality effects how these temperature increases are distributed throughout the water column. Elevated water temperatures decrease oxygen levels, which can kill fish and alter food chain composition, reduce species biodiversity, and foster invasion by new thermophilic species."
I never had the feeling that any of the shower heads here I was standing under was particularly bad. Maybe it's different with those ominous low flow thingies.
But: If you're not using massage jets, is high or low flow even relevant? To get shampoo out of your hair you just need water and hands. But according to Jerry and Kramer it's a catastrophe.
(Maybe because American shower heads are fixed mounted and as such are higher above the head?)
Average-house fixtures in Europe are probably higher quality than average-house fixtures in the US.
https://www.wolf-aqua-manufaktur.de/shop/de/bubble-rain-hand...
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I knew that this was the moment when I could later claim that this was the moment when I knew Trump was going to win
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“I lather up and then you turn on this crazy shower and the thing — ‘drip, drip,’ and you say, ‘I’m going to be here for 45 minutes. What the — ?’” he said, giving new meaning to the term stream of consciousness but also inadvertently getting at what that British study had found.
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This guy seems like a complete hack, but he's also just what Bezos ordered.
I’m following in the long HN tradition of commenting in the thread without reading the article, but… that’s a pretty funny mockery of all the “that’s when I knew Trump was going to win” blather.
My current apartment came with a showerhead that (I assume) was compliant with the Obama/Biden rules. It dribbled water until, sopping wet and desperate, I grabbed a pair of pliers and bashed out the flow limiter. My water bill didn't even budge.
It is a good read!