How your showerhead and fridge got roped into the culture wars
How your showerhead and fridge got roped into the culture wars
Efficient appliances used to have bipartisan support. What happened?
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I'm fine with putting more insulation on refrigerators, but low-flow showerheads are a serious disappointment in showering experience. I want to be hammered by that water, not misted.
I always get downvoted for saying it, but I don't care because the real water savings never came from stupid showers: It comes from not growing crops in the damned desert; it comes from not growing grass on lawns in arid environments; it comes from not raising so many cattle.
Most low flow shower heads have a plastic insert in them called a restrictor that can be removed to make it work like the high flow ones.
It's nothing more than a small cylinder that can be pushed or pulled out from the shower line and manufacturers use these restrictors because it allows them to sell the same unit in multiple markets.
EDIT: Forgot to add water savings reasons.
I had to come back here specifically to thank you.
We have a "rainfall" showerhead that has been a huge disappointment since we installed it. Your comment popped into my head today as I was about to jump in the shower. All I had to do was remove a little o-ring and now it works fantastic! It also cut my shower time in half.
I'm glad I was able to help, thank you for letting me know. You made my day!
Crazy how simple that is to make such an impact on daily life isn't it?
because the real water savings never came from stupid showers:
Another factor is that your shower water is very probably --- unless you have some sort of gray-water irrigation system going on or something --- heading to a sewage treatment plant, and if we wanted to do so, we can purify the water there, make that closed loop and feed back into the water supply, recover basically all the water from treatment.
The UK does it:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/29/uk-drink-sewage-water-squeamish-wastewater-recycle/
California and some other states are doing it:
California has been using recycled wastewater for decades. The Ontario Reign minor league hockey team has used it to make ice for its rink in Southern California. Soda Springs Ski Resort near Lake Tahoe has used it to make snow. And farmers in the Central Valley, where much of the nation’s vegetables, fruits and nuts are grown, use it to water their crops.
But it hasn’t been used directly for drinking water. Orange County operates a large water purification system that recycles wastewater and then uses it to refill underground aquifers. The water mingles with the groundwater for months before being pumped up and used for drinking water again.
California’s new rules would let — but not require — water agencies to take wastewater, treat it, and then put it right back into the drinking water system. California would be just the second state to allow this, following Colorado.
The new rules require the wastewater be treated for all pathogens and viruses, even if the pathogens and viruses aren’t in the wastewater. That’s different from regular water treatment rules, which only require treatment for known pathogens, said Darrin Polhemus, deputy director of the division of drinking water for the California Water Resources Control Board.
In fact, the treatment is so stringent it removes all of the minerals that make fresh drinking water taste good — meaning they have to be added back at the end of the process.
“It’s at the same drinking water quality, and probably better in many instances,” Polhemus said.
Plus, in California and a lot of other places, we can (and do) desalinate water.
https://www.sdcwa.org/your-water/local-water-supplies/seawater-desalination/
In November 2012, the Water Authority approved a 30-year Water Purchase Agreement with Poseidon Water for the purchase of up to 56,000 acre-feet of desalinated seawater per year, approximately 10 percent of the San Diego region’s water demand.
It costs more than pulling from a river, and that's economically-difficult for agriculture...but it's just not prohibitive for residential use, and there's a whole ocean of water out there.
https://www.sdcwa.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/desal-carlsbad-fs.pdf
Based on current electricity cost estimates, the Water Purchase Agreement sets the price of water at about $3,400/ acre-feet for fiscal year 2024.
An acre-foot of water will, depending upon where in the country you are --- usage levels vary by area --- supply about one to four households for a year at average usage. And that price is in California; electricity is a major input to desalination, and California has some of the highest electricity prices in the US, generally second only to Hawaii and something like double most of the country. It'll be significantly cheaper to desalinate water in most other places.
There are also showers that reclaim shower water while you shower. Most water goes down the drain clean. It's apparently easy to separate that from water that's mixed with soap and dirt, and send it back op the shower again. This can dramatically cut back on your water use much more effectively throttling the water flow.
Not that I disagree, but good ones DO have a different system in place. They take in air, to make the drops bigger and it feels like there's more water being spread out. Doesn't help with the pressure complaint, but it does really help IMO!
And that does save you money because less energy is used to heat up water.
As someone who dislikes traditional low flow heads that tend to icepick you with little streams, I highly recommend high sierra showerheads. I don't know how they pull it off, but it absolutely blasts you with water while still being low flow. Like I prefer it to any other shower head I've tried, low flow or not.
They make one with an adjustable valve that let's you dial in the perfect amount of flow too.
Their website says make american showers great again :\
I'll grant you that language is potentially a dogwhistle, but on their blog, they post about Earth day and Sustainability, which is currently vilified by MAGA.
If I had to guess, their marketing team is trying to play both sides.
Without more clear evidence of their politics, I'll probably continue to recommend them if they get people to stick with saving water, as ultimately that's the opposite of what Trump's policies are trying to do.
Since the flow regulators became standard issue in the 90s, showers are not as good as they were. While the specific messaging may or may not have another meaning related to us politics, it seems like they stand for better showers while using less water, and that seems like a good mission to me.
High Sierra shower heads are awesome. Installed them in each of our bathrooms. Feels like a rain shower, with more pressure then our previous stock shower head while still saving water. Win-win. They also manufacture them in small town in the foothills of the Sierra mountains which is a pretty cool fact.
I liked em so much I wrote a blog post about it
I used to feel the same way, going as far as to drill out the flow restriction devices, but I found a shower head I actually like a few years back, a high Sierra brand one, and even it's lowest flow model feels powerful
I liked it so much I wrote a blog post about it
Thanks for sharing this. I really prefer the wider diameter nozzles as this style always just feels like a garden hose to me, but I might give it a try as I also have not been very happy with anything I've tried. Any reason you didn't do the long nut version?
These don't really feel like a garden hose, best comparable thing is the spray from a good impact or rotor sprinkler.
I didn't get the long nut because it wasn't an option when I bought them a few years ago haha
Yeah I'm still looking for something where I can close my eyes (as I often do) and feel like I'm in a tropical rainstorm. Right now have a wide head but it's more akin to 15 squirrels perched on a branch pissing on me.
it's more akin to 15 squirrels perched on a branch pissing on me.
I laughed way too hard at this. Mine and my wife's favorite shower head in a long time has been the Delta showerhead we got at Costco: https://www.costco.com/delta-h2okinetic-in2ition-5-setting-hand-shower.product.100763750.html
Very useful and customizations for each of us like being able to turn off the water during shampoo lathering or shaving and detaching it to rinse off.
Same. Managed to remove the flow regulator out of my new one. Back to proper pressure!
Proper pressure = quicker showers and replacing the showerhead less often because the hard water buildup doesn't turn the lazy river pressure into a trickle. Needing to double flush a low flow toilet sucks too.
Agriculture in the wrong areas and useless lawns are the real water wasters.