People bemoaning low flow don’t have experience with a good shower head. (Note: the author acknowledges this!)
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.
But have you experienced a high flow _and_ high pressure shower head? Sooooo good.
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.
> 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
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.
Yeah there's ok feeling accumpuncture low pressure shower heads. But dangerously high pressure shower head is like lying on bed of nails, acquired taste, pretty incredible feeling. My mom swore it maintained her skin better, my bro science is it's also better for skin... as in it bruises it like microneedling and forces skin to rejuvenate. Have to avoid getting shot in the eye on big nozzles though.
But I don’t want 1.75 gpm compressed into tiny high-pressure jets. I want (and have) a perfectly normal shower head except with the flow limiter ripped out and now the “mist” setting is a thick deluge of water while the high pressure jet settings are, if anything, uncomfortable.
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.
> 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.
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.
Delta shower heads work well at both 2.5 and 1.85 gpm. After installing in a shower that barely trickled straight down, the shower hits the far side of the tub.
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."
Your standards are tragically low if hitting the far side of the tub is impressive. I’m pretty sure if I stuck the wand out the shower door, my shower could hit the next room. (So I don’t do that.)
Are they easy to take apart? I feel like many of them are made to resemble a single piece even if they aren’t. Are there brands built to be easy to work on?
Mine’s a waterpik. I think I looked up a YouTube video (not brand or model specific) for how to identify and remove the flow limiter. It wasn’t hard at all.
I worked finance at a pulp mill once - a small pulp mill by international standards. The mill used 90 million litres of water a day. It has been hard to take my own efforts to save water seriously since then.
Being wasteful is generally bad, but changing consumer behaviour is mostly a distraction from industrial resource use. I can't believe we still waste so much time and effort on "recycling" plastic water bottles when there are so many things that would be orders of magnitude more useful, if only we were willing and able to upset large companies.
Something I like about the recycling scheme for single-use plastic and aluminium cans here in Germany is a secondary aspect: It reduces littering of those. I remember the decades before the scheme and it a least reduced this.
Of all the schemes I've seen I think the German Pfand system works the best. Solid re-usable bottles, and a small but nontrivial cash incentive to return bottles.
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).
The slogan is "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" in that order.
industrial resource use is to indirectly fulfill individual demand. Recycling might be a sham but reducing individual consumption would make a difference.
My opinion is to do my best but not to overthink it. If I need to throw a plastic bottle away and there isn’t recycling available putting it in the trash isn’t going to alter history. That doesn’t mean when recycling is available I don’t prioritize it.
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.
It’s a sort of luxury disease. It used to be that life entailed so much material suffering that people needed to rationalize that they were suffering for something, and so human beings got incredibly good at that coping mechanism. So good that now that we live in a world where we have material abundance, we cannot believe it, and then we go out of our way to impoverish ourselves just so we can feel good that at least we’re suffering for something.
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.
I think if we banned almond milk, California would have no water problems at all. Almond cultivation uses much more water than residential water in CA, so you’d think the first thing they’d stop doing is putting all of that water into almonds just to turn around and process the almonds into ersatz milk. But no, you gotta wear the hairshirt instead.
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.
I pulled our flow restrictor out a couple years ago and watched our water bills over the year before and year after.
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.
Living in California I'm just tired of the pervasive limitations on so many things when it makes virtually no net difference in overall usage. We have a house on a large, isolated property. We have our own well and a 600 gallon tank with a septic system. No one else is pulling from the water table for many miles around. Essentially all of our water is recycled back into the water table from the septic system. Yet I still had to test, modify and, in one case, replace, shower heads, faucets and toilets to get devices with minimally acceptable flow. As you said, at most around a 2% difference in consumption for something that works well and feels great.
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.
Low flow showers suck because places install even lower than required flow heads and then they get calcium build up and it’s absolutely awful. 2.5g/m is good enough on a well designed shower head but 1.5 or 1 is not. It might be possible to compensate with high water pressure but it’s expensive and risky to pressurize incoming water beyond what it comes out of the tap as.
> In 2023, according to the Financial Times, data centers in Northern Virginia alone used nearly 2 billion gallons of water. University of California at Riverside researchers estimate that, in 2027, thirsty AI will slurp up between 1.1 trillion and 1.7 trillion gallons of water globally.
What does "used" mean in this case? Aren't these closed systems?
That seems quite different; the water isn’t used up at all. Of course there could be some consequence of dumping heat into the water (my gut says—usually it turns out we don’t have enough power to appreciably change the temperature of a river, but I guess it depends on the rate of flow of the river and the amount of heat).
"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."
Maybe your municipality does. My city water is from a river. It is withdrawn, treated, used, treated as sewage, and then dumped back in the river. Even water used for irrigation eventually ends up there.
This is one of the weird US debates I, a German, don't understand, like that Seinfeld episode back then.
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?)
I got a 1.5gpm (6Lpm) from this brand (sorry, German manufacturer/site, use a translator) which works awesomely well. It does mix air very effectively into the water, providing a very good illusion of a normal shower.
the author might enjoy acquiring a pressure washer from his boss! Decisive action to take back his personal liberty and getting a proper high-pressure cleanse will be beneficial to humanity for sure.
The claim in the title is not substantiated in the slightest. it's a hook to get you to read Lasswell's confused jumble of weak quips and outright misleading statements.
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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
Wow, pretty impressive, Mark. A single video posted to social media told you that?
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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.
This would be the study that found that people are _satisfied_ with low flow when water pressure is high.
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This guy seems like a complete hack, but he's also just what Bezos ordered.
>> 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
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.
It's frankly ridiculous that people thousands of miles away in Washington have any say over what goes on in our bathrooms (modulo basic safety strictures.)
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.
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.
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