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Mist Showers: Sustainable Decadence? (2019)
- synctext 6y agoWithin this context: "drain water heat recovery unit" for a Google search. Upcoming building codes within Europe might make this common I believe.
- Xylakant 6y agoThere’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 6y agoSolar hot water panels are also pretty effective. You get water hot enough for showering even on cloudy days here in the UK.
- jotm 6y agoIn 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.
- VBprogrammer 6y agoMaybe electric cars will bring in the days of home CHP. The combination of a natural gas combustion engine with a good use for the waste heat can be circa 90% efficient.
- calaphos 6y agoHere in Germany we commonly have negative electricity prices at exchanges and with a increasingly higher percentage of renewable energy is will only become more common. It would be very easy to use the energy to heat up warm water in the already existing warm water boilers just by adding a cheap electric heating element to the usual gas burner. The necessary smart meters for billing are actually mandatory in new installations. However with current consumer electricity prices completely removed from the large scale exchanges and more expensive than ever I don't see that happening right now.
- fooblat 6y agoI 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 6y agoWhat 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.
- red_admiral 6y agoI need to put on sun-cream to go outside in the current weather, and washing it off again with soap in the evening makes me feel a lot less hot and sticky than just a rinse and towel.
- thom 6y agoPeople who don't use soap generally smell worse to those that do.
- frosted-flakes 6y ago
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago> 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.
- billy_beef 6y agoAusterity measures are passed all the time under guises of a balanced budget or trimming fat. When govts cut food stamps people die, I think govts cutting hot showers might be doable.
- austinjp 6y agoWhile I partly agree with you, unpopular political moves are weaponised during elections. If the opposition win they can revoke previous changes. This highlights issues around populism, and democracy in general.
- MatekCopatek 6y ago"Humans" aren't an inherent unchangeable force of nature. What you're describing is a result of living in the current socio-economical system, which can be changed.
- throwaway894345 6y agoI took it as implied that the change has to happen in the near future, before runaway climate change is a fate-sealing certainty. And we don’t need to change the current socio-economic system in any fundamental way; we just need to tax pollution so the cost isn’t externalized. This is a pretty simple, small change; just need the political will.
- chimprich 6y ago
- VBprogrammer 6y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21535380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21535380
- mattlondon 6y agoTangent: 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 6y agoI actually enjoyed the overlay and the image format.
- throwaway894345 6y agoThe 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.
- jononor 6y agoI started designing this kind of device. In addition to tracking consumption, the concept had automatic mixing of hot/cold water to get good stable temperature. And a timer to facilitate non-continuous showers, press once to get wet, then soap in while shower is off, press again to rinse off.
- mmm_grayons 6y agoI'm guessing you might be able to make money selling that to, e.g. the military, but not to regular people. Most take showers at least in part to relax, and that sounds like it would kill any possibility of relaxation.
- jononor 6y agoAgreed, at least in volume. Which is more or less needed for a hardware product like this. There might be one can reach some thousands via the Internet, maybe using a Kickstarter type platform. But probably would quickly saturate its own niche market.
- mattlondon 6y ago> tells people how much water they used, or better yet, energy, or better yet, carbon. If you want to really change behavior, show them how much it cost them. You'll see usage plummet as soon as people see the $/£/€ ticking up in front of their eyes.
- JohnStrangeII 6y agoOne 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.
- xwdv 6y agoWe can solve this problem already with tankless water heaters.
- adav 6y agoThe article mentions this and has a link at the end to very detailed precautions to avoid legionella bacteria in water systems.
- JohnStrangeII 6y agoSorry, 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.
- pengaru 6y agoMy 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.
- corty 6y agoYou 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 6y agoThe last line resonates with me. It helps if you have a second bathroom with which to test.
- gabordemooij 6y ago"This is a solar-powered website, which means it sometimes goes offline" -- yeah, welcome to the future.
- gabordemooij 6y agoYes please more downvotes! Let's silence every voice in the name of Green Communism! This site is pathetic.
- gabordemooij 6y agoI thought developers have been able to think individually but you are nothing more than hive mind zombies.
- aww_dang 6y agoApparently this is a site for entrepreneurs?
- dang 6y agoDownvotes can be annoying but everyone gets them. Please don't go on tilt like this. Or like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23359460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23359460. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- lightgreen 6y ago> 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 6y agoThis site only seems to be interested in solutions that seem to utterly degrade humans, like eliminating showers and travel, or eating worms.
- bilbo0s 6y agoI 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 6y agoThose 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.)
- dkdk8283 6y agoMist 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 6y ago> 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 6y agoIn 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 6y agoIndeed, 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.
- 6y ago
- tom_mellior 6y agoI 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.
- hyko 6y agoIf we can’t even make a regular shower sustainable, then our civilisation is fucked. Next month: how to enjoy your weekly sponge bath!
- carapace 6y agoOur 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
- crazygringo 6y agoI'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 6y agoI 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.
- jotm 6y agoMy first thought was "that needs a high pressure pump" haha, which would kind of defeat the purpose. Probably still way less water usage though.
- derefr 6y agoWere 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.
- ideal_stingray 6y agoAs 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.