I’ve read following article on lowtechmagazine.com a while ago: Mist Showers: Sustainable Decadence?
I’m someone who showers quite a lot (sometimes up to twice daily), especially in humid summer weather. Usually, it’s one warm one with a bit of soap, to get rid of dust, smells/ sweat, chemicals and dirt, and to sleep better, and then sometimes a quick cold shower in the morning without any surfactants, especially when I’ve sweat a lot in the night.
According to the article, showering often takes up to a few hundred liters of warm water in some cases, which is super inefficient to heat up. Reducing the water usage would also extremely reduce energy consumption A LOT.
In my case, I don’t shower long, don’t have the lever opened completely, and don’t like (too) warm showers anyway. Still, I found the concept of spray showers very interesting, and I’m thinking about building one for myself. Someone has to do the first steps, right?
Does anybody here already have one, and wants to show their experience with it?
I also have a few questions:
- Was it hard to build?
- Do I have to consider anything, especially regarding safety and leaks (high pressure), clogged nozzles, and cleaning?
- How does the experience of showering with them feel like? Do you still get as clean as with a regular shower head, even without soap?
- How do guests react to it? Do they like it?
Thanks a lot! :)
My wife and I built a travel trailer. We needed to judge our water usage to decide capacity.
My wife has long hair, all the way to the top of her butt. Without rushing it takes her 10gal (~40L) of water to have a shower where she washes her hair. At the other extreme, either of us can take a basic shower where we turn the water off until needed, a “navy shower”, with 2gal (~8L).
In the US all shower heads are limited to a maximum of 1.75 gal/min (~7L). It’d take about a half hour to use 200L+.
The first thing you could do is to heavily shorten the time the water is running. One or two minutes split between start and finish is sufficient. If even more severe limitations are wanted then install a bidet or kitchen faucet sprayer instead of a shower head.
Much is pointless, without meaningful effect. Go after the corporations polluting, using, and often stealing the vast majority of our water. And, move out of Phoenix and Las Vegas.
In the US, all heads are limited to that, but because most people in the US hate it, every shower head manufacturer I know of makes removing a restrictive ring or washer or whatnot in the shower head extremely easy to just remove before you install the head.