
Mist Showers: Sustainable Decadence? (2019) - hochmartinez
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/10/mist-showers-sustainable-decadence.html
======
throwaway894345
The missing component in all of these green initiatives aimed at changing
human behavior is a simple feedback loop. Put a fucking indicator somewhere in
the shower that tells people how much water they used, or better yet, energy,
or better yet, carbon. Show them their week over week, month over month, etc
information and positively reward them (via tone—and other UI hints—of the
message, e.g., “you reduced your shower carbon by X this month! Great work!”).
If you do that even my backwoods relatives who still burn their garbage will
start using less and less water, even all the while talking about how climate
change is all a hoax.

~~~
red_admiral
I might be in a minority overall, but I really dislike gamification creeping
into everyday life. I don't want some kind of cutesy "points" for showering
ecologically, possibly linked to a virtual currency on an app (which
conventiently also collects vital telemetry information).

~~~
a-p-o
It doesn't need to be digital feedback. Imagine you could physically see the
water from a shower filling into a column of water. Let's say 70 liters might
reach 6 ft. If someone could see this and wanted to use less water, then they
just need to keep their showers short enough that the water fills to the 60
liter mark, then the 40 liter mark, until they're happy with their efforts. No
crypto currency. No telemetry.

~~~
red_admiral
That I could get behind. The parent post though said "positively reward them
(via tone—and other UI hints—of the message, e.g., “you reduced your shower
carbon by X this month! Great work!”)" and that crosses my personal line for
creepiness.

~~~
andrei_says_
Thank you for mentioning Kohn’s work.

It boggles my mind how super smart people just don’t get that human beings
cannot be incentivized the same way rats and birds can.

Reward/punishments (same thing) kill intrinsic motivation. It has been proven
countless times.

Providing feedback as in making something visible is another story altogether
and can be empowering.

Speaking to people like an adult trying to manipulate 3-year olds is
condescending, inappropriate and repulsive.

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
> The daily shower would be hard to sustain in a world without fossil fuels.

If this is really true, then I see no hope for us. Humans will not make
sacrifices to their way of life voluntarily, and will politically punish
anyone who makes them do so. When this comes before the voters, “I am the
person taking away your hot showers” is going to be a losing stance.

We can’t “conserve” our way out of this. We will need a breakthrough in clean
energy tech. We need a world where the energy for hot showers is plentiful and
clean.

~~~
chimprich
> Humans will not make sacrifices to their way of life voluntarily

I don't think that's true at all.

Currently (speaking from the UK at least) people have been making huge
sacrifices in their lives for months. Although ostensibly this has been
enforced, in reality it is impossible to police and has almost entirely been
done voluntarily, through persuasion, and with much popular support. These
sacrifices have been far greater than using less water in showers.

> We can’t “conserve” our way out of this. We will need a breakthrough in
> clean energy tech.

It's no use being defeatist about this when the problem is much greater than
the solution.

It's as if at the start of WWII politicians started saying, well, people won't
tolerate being conscripted and having rationing, we might as well do nothing.

Incidentally, I've heard wishes for breakthroughs in clean energy tech for
decades, and we've since had major advances in things like solar, wind and
batteries. We can hope for more advances in the coming years but we shouldn't
bank on it - we have the technology already to tackle the problem.

~~~
RcouF1uZ4gsC
The examples you are giving are examples of short term sacrifices.

However, take a look at the UK post WWII. Winston Churchill got voted out of
office. The big thing people wanted was a return to normalcy and the way
things had been before.

~~~
lmm
On the contrary, Atlee won the 1945 election on a platform of radical social
reform: national healthcare, social security, and state-funded education.

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mattlondon
Tangent: I appreciate what they are doing with their solar-powered server, but
they could make the site so much easier to read by removing the whole-page
overlay to be something less obnoxious and irritating to read when half the
page is yellow and half is not.

Perhaps a thing to let you "minimise" it so it only takes up a 1cm bar on the
side, or a thing to just let you dismiss/hide it entirely?

Also for the image dithering, it kinda feels like they've gone too far with
that - I guess it is a stylistic thing to have huge huge huge dithered images
that at best don't fit on a single screen at once or at worst require you to
scroll past 2 or 3 screen heights worth (e.g. "A 6-nozzle mist shower" one),
yet with a resolution so low you can't actually read the text (NASA image)?

In my opinion it would be better to have higher resolution dithered images,
that are just physically smaller and fit on one screen (I am using a 1920x1080
1x1-DPI so not exactly huge by modern standards but not tiny) so that the
file-size balances out.

I found the article really hard to read due to the 50/50 yellow-not yellow and
the absurdly large low-res pictures that I needed to scroll to see the entire
thing but actually cant see because the resolution is so poor. Sorry. :(

~~~
franciscop
I actually enjoyed the overlay and the image format.

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Xylakant
There’s one aspect about the energy use of warm water that this article
glosses over: warm water is particularly easy to store. Heat is also a
byproduct of many industrial processes- reusing and storing that heat or
warming up your boiler at peak energy production time is an efficient way to
make use of “waste” energy. This significantly reduces the effective energy
usage of any warm water usage.

There’s also ways to efficiently turn electricity into heat - heat pumps for
example. These “produce” around 3-4 joule of usable heat per joule of electric
energy. Just using a heat pump instead of an electric heater cuts the
mentioned energy costs to a quarter.

~~~
nicoburns
Solar hot water panels are also pretty effective. You get water hot enough for
showering even on cloudy days here in the UK.

~~~
jotm
In countries with a lot of suntime, it can be as simple as a black
tank/radiator outside. 3-6 months of free hot water with absolutely minimal
investment.

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JohnStrangeII
One problem that article does not address is that mist showers with warm water
seem like a perfect recipe for breeding _Legionnaire Disease_ , a very
dangerous and deadly form of pneumonia. This is especially true if you store
the water in a warm state for longer times rather than heating it on the fly.
Unless this problem is addressed, mist showers are not a good idea.

~~~
adav
The article mentions this and has a link at the end to very detailed
precautions to avoid legionella bacteria in water systems.

~~~
JohnStrangeII
Sorry, I overlooked that passage. The link is in the last paragraph, after the
main article. Should have read it more carefully. Anyway, it's a problem.

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corty
You can get a sufficient amount of hot water for all your family's daily
shower out of 3m² of thermal solar panels. no fossil energy necessary.

Water isn't scarce in many parts of the world, and domestic use is most often
negligible anyways.

Cool tech though, will have to investigate the local wife-acceptance-factor

~~~
rocky1138
The last line resonates with me. It helps if you have a second bathroom with
which to test.

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lightgreen
> The Carbon Footprint of the Daily Shower

Nuclear power plants have zero carbon footprint. Let’s build them instead of
reducing quality of life.

~~~
tengbretson
This site only seems to be interested in solutions that seem to utterly
degrade humans, like eliminating showers and travel, or eating worms.

~~~
bilbo0s
I don't think that's the case. I think a lot of people here just realize that
nuclear plants are expensive. It's 1 to 5 billion optimistically for the new
designs provided you don't have any taxes or regulations at all. It's multiple
times more for designs that we actually have experience with. If the
government wanted to build some, at government expense, I'd be all for it.
That said, I'm not at all surprised that no private energy investment groups
have put their money on the table for nuclear. (Especially after the financial
disaster that is Vogtie).

Nuclear really is just too expensive right now, and therefore too risky, for
many of the energy players in the private sector. Again, if the government was
to shoulder the majority of that risk, I think you might have some takers
maybe? But as it stands? No way.

I'll even go so far as to say that if the nuclear supporters on HN were the
energy billionaires, I'd give good odds that they wouldn't put their money on
nuclear either. Even if you spotted them a no tax and no regulation
environment. The nuclear supporters on HN would still wait for government help
in the same manner as the big energy players today.

~~~
derefr
Those are fixed per-plant overhead costs, though.

If you need twice as much power, then rather than building twice as many
nuclear plants, you can just build one plant _far less than_ twice as big, to
output twice as much energy. (I believe it scales logarithmically, actually.)

 _Spreading_ nuclear energy is costly (insofar as you eventually need to build
more plants, because no power grid is 100% lossless over long distances); but
_scaling_ nuclear power in response to densification of urban areas is cheap
(as long as you do it in advance.)

The problem is that, in places where it’d make a lot of sense to just plop
down a nuclear plant, there’s either heavy existing investment into e.g. coal;
or the nearby area is _as yet_ too small to “pay back” the costs of nuclear
investment.

Really, what nuclear power fits hand-in-glove with, is centralized urban
regional planning (i.e. planning a large global city 50 years in advance.) But
hardly anyone does that. Even the USSR didn’t do that.

There’s one region that _is_ doing top-down regional planning right now:
Dubai. But, ah, they don’t need the energy.

(Though that raises an interesting point: a large uranium deposit could be
exploited on the global market in a very similar way to a large oil deposit,
if a country so desired. Harvest the electricity locally with nuclear plants;
create some fuel out of it [hydrogen? ethanol?]; and sell+ship the resulting
fuel globally. There could totally be a “nuclear Dubai” built on the resulting
resource-extraction economy.)

~~~
lightgreen
> no power grid is 100% lossless over long distances

Power loss is actually just around 5% per 1000km. So if electricity is made
twice as cheap it can be transferred virtually anywhere in the US from a
single point in today’s price (of course we won’t build a single power plant,
that’s just an illustration of the fact that transmission cost is not
prohibitively high).

~~~
derefr
The US (and/or China, Russia, and Canada) are bad examples, because most
countries are not nearly as large, and most countries want some measure of
"ensured by our own hand" electrical-grid independence/fault-tolerance (even
though they share a power-grid with their neighbours), just like most
countries want a standing border-defence force (even if they participate in a
defence alliance.)

So what you'd get in practice, in a nuclear-first world, is O(K log N) power
plants: i.e., log(N) plants _per country_ , for each of K≥195 countries.

~~~
lightgreen
The world already operates more than 195 nuclear power plants.

------
pengaru
My semi off-grid cabin has no well so I haul water. Showering is by far the
biggest consumer, though I use a composting toilet so there's no flushing to
compete with.

Having to literally carry every gallon used has completely restructured my
relationship with water.

It feels very wrong to use a flush toilet now. What an obscene thing to do
with potable water, especially in a drought-stricken place like California.

------
dkdk8283
Mist showers aren’t very comfortable. I personally enjoy high flow showers.
I’d rather see water usage cut at golf courses and other industrial uses. We
as humans shouldn’t deprive ourself first, only as a last resort.

~~~
usrusr
> I personally enjoy high flow showers.

Me, too, I feel kind of addicted actually. One change that I have noticed is
that it must be about two decades since I last owned a washcloth. I wonder if
they had been part of the customary hotel bathroom set back then or were they
considered part of what the first would bring?

As a high-flow addict what I'd really love to have is a closed loop shower,
because what I certainly don't need is drinking water quality the entire time.
Use fresh water only at the beginning until the loop is filled (perhaps
manually or automatically omitting recapture of the first few tens of seconds
of the initial flow, for when you come in really dirty), then cycle for as
long as you want, then again fresh water for a final rinse. Bonus points for a
button to purge/refill mid-shower if you want it a bit cleaner.

I consider this concept one of those good things that is threatened by the
perfect (expecting people to shower less or downgrade to mist-showers or
washcloths)

~~~
calaphos
In a lot of places in the world fresh water is not an issue and a higher rate
of usage actually helps with sewer systems and prevents them from clogging.

However recovering the waste heat from a shower, e.g. by running the drain
water trough a heat exchanger with the freshwater would already help saving a
lot of energy.

~~~
usrusr
Indeed, my main issue with my shower is "why tf doesn't this thing have some
heat recovery". But that wouldn't be considered an alternative to more radical
solutions like a mist shower in the same way a water cycle would.

~~~
dkdk8283
In warmer climates you can capture waste heat from your a/c and heat water at
the cost of running a small recirculating pump.

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crazygringo
I'm intrigued, but I honestly don't understand how they rinse effectively.

On the one hand, the article explains how a Navy shower uses a 30-second
rinse, which feels like how long I need to rinse for to get all the soap and
shampoo off.

But then the article says "a mist shower of 8.9 minutes offers plenty of time
to get rid of soap and shampoo".

Huh? If it takes me two minutes to lather up, am I spending 7 minutes just
waiting for enough mist to gradually collect to rinse? That sounds... horribly
inefficient and just bad design generally.

(It also admits it won't work for people who need to rinse long hair, so
statistically this seems very male-centric.)

I'd much rather just get it done with in 30 seconds. In fact, I can't see
_any_ benefits over a Navy shower at all here, only drawbacks. Am I missing
something?

~~~
andrewflnr
I think the benefit over a navy shower is that you still have some warm water
while you're lathering so you don't get cold. I can imagine a hybrid approach
where you switch to full flow just for rinsing.

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fooblat
I think the is one of the easiest personal ways to reduce consumption. I
challenged myself and have recently completed 2 years of no "continuous"
showers.

Instead, I sit in my empty bathtub and use the spray only for getting wet
enough to soap up and rinsing off. In between, all my lathering and scrubbing
is done with the spray off.

As a person who loves long hot showers, this initially took some getting used
to, but now it is my daily routine.

~~~
tdons
What if you also drop the soap, that way you need even less water.

I'm not trolling by the way, I believe soap mostly isn't necessary. I'm
interested in why everyone uses it when they take a shower.

~~~
thom
People who don't use soap generally smell worse to those that do.

~~~
nasmorn
I don’t smell after showering either with or without soap. This state only
lasts a very short while in either case unless I apply deodorant. So soap
really does nothing for me smell wise.

~~~
djrogers
Most people who smell bad don’t realize they do.

------
synctext
Within this context: "drain water heat recovery unit" for a Google search.
Upcoming building codes within Europe might make this common I believe.

------
carapace
Our water systems are just boneheaded, the _indoor outhouse_ was only invented
yesterday!

Here in San Francisco, our water comes from Hetch Hetchy[1][2] two hundred
miles away. You turn on the tap, it flows into the drain and away again, to a
processing plant and then, I think, the Pacific Ocean. That is objectively
insane.

A less insane system would capture and store water on the way in and the way
out, keep some of it in a large (house-sized) tank at ~120°F (storing low-
grade thermal energy, typically waste heat from other systems plus solar) and
feed the showers through a small continuous-flow heater (JIT heating). Waste
water from the shower can go right into the garden if you use the right soap.

(Lavender flowers work great as soap. "Its late Latin name was _lavandārius_ ,
from _lavanda_ (things to be washed), from the verb _lavāre_ (to wash)."[3]
The English word "lave" is of the same root.)

I lived off-grid in the woods for a time and we had long-as-you-like hot
showers. That's half the benefit of civilization right there in the bathroom!
Just _think things through_ and yu can have a high standard of living without
the ridiculous waste.

It's fun, cheap, and easy.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hetch_Hetchy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hetch_Hetchy)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O'Shaughnessy_Dam_(California)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O'Shaughnessy_Dam_\(California\))

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavandula](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavandula)

------
derefr
Were the energy calculations in the article done under the assumption of “all
humans” living in single-family homes with their own water boilers? Because
hot water has economies of scale (oddly enough, in pretty much the same ways
that cloud-compute does.) If most of the world lives in apartments (or even
just townhouses served by large shared central boilers with well-insulated
underground hot-water plumbing), I suspect the energy calculation works out a
lot differently.

------
VBprogrammer
Previous discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21535380](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21535380)

------
tom_mellior
I have this showerhead that has a mist setting: [https://cirrus-
shower.com/](https://cirrus-shower.com/) (I didn't buy the "aromatherapy" add-
on stuff). It's good, but water flow is indeed a problem, and my heater
switches off mid-shower when the showerhead is on the finest setting and uses
the least amount of water.

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ideal_stingray
As is, this seems utterly useless for rinsing hair (particularly long hair),
and it’s difficult to see how it can achieve broad adoption with this flaw. If
there was a pushbutton that would turn on a “high flow” nozzle for 30 seconds
at a time for hair-rinsing purposes, it would be much more functional.

------
jotm
My first thought was "that needs a high pressure pump" haha, which would kind
of defeat the purpose. Probably still way less water usage though.

------
hyko
If we can’t even make a regular shower sustainable, then our civilisation is
fucked.

Next month: how to enjoy your weekly sponge bath!

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gabordemooij
"This is a solar-powered website, which means it sometimes goes offline"

\--

yeah, welcome to the future.

