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! :)
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Another option is to turn the water off in between steps if you don’t already. So turn it off when you lather up, wash your hair, etc and only use water to rinse off after each step. It helps reduce how much you use by only having the water on for a short time overall. With a lot of showerhead attachments you can turn the water off right there so you don’t have to fiddle with the temperature controls every time.
I have friends with one of those valves on their shower, and it’s really easy to use. One thing I wonder about is how it effects things down the line. They have a septic tank, but I’m also thinking of greywater systems for watering plants or whatever.
Could the concentration of soap in the water interphere with things?
I personally wouldn’t use greywater for plants since it’s a mixture or oils, skin, hair, and soap/shampoo. Not without treating and filtering it beforehand. Greywater always smells far more foul than blackwater in my experience.
I made a shitty prototype with irrigation mister nozzle heads from alibaba or somewhere similar. I used 3 mm tubing and made some connectors from 3d print.
What I learned:
- It’s a fun project
- 3D prints of connectors and tube adapters will be leaky if you are not a pro and knows what type of plastic to use. (I’m not experienced enough.) I would recommend finding proper standardised tube adapters and purchase them instead.
- You save some water, however the temperature feels much colder, and therefore your guests might not like it if your water is not hot enough.
- I enjoyed the gentle feeling of it, however it is very different from a regular shower head, where it feels like your skin is power washed clean. I used my hands more for cleaning my water misted skin. I had a feeling I got just as clean.
- I vaguely remember something with some mistborne disease which there could be a higher risk of, using this kind of system, but I don’t remember.
I experimented with 1-5 nozzle heads, and the more you add the more it feels like a regular shower head, with the intensity the water hits the skin, aaand the more water you use… 3 was a minimum to me.
I did not use it long enough to experience it clogging. I stopped using it because my fittings and tube adapters got too leaky to provide a proper pressure, and I didn’t have the patience to fix it. This post has made me want to get a go at it again :P
I was also inspired by that article
Cheers
Thanks for explaining!
You are thinking of legionnaires disease
Awesome! Thanks for that!
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.
I thought about it, but apparently it needs higher water temperatures than what my solar-termal water heater and air-to-water heatpump usually produces, so I scrapped the idea again.
I’d still be curious to know whether a mist is comfortable and how much water it consumes.
