Yah, this is what my brain does [Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος]

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We all know how slippery shower thoughts can get, right? Well last night, after sufficient soap was applied and the miracle of modern plumbing was delivering a pleasant stream of warm water to my skin, my brain somehow went from the lyrics of "Black Powder And Alcohol" to wondering how well a cinderblock igloo would work and how long one would take to build. (Waterproofing a computer so I can access Google in the shower would actually be a very bad idea unless I also installed one of those "no tank, just flash-heat the water as it zips past" water heaters in the bathroom to enable arbitrarily long showers.)

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There are 15 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

I'm thinking of moving in with my son, just for the showers. I never realized how wussy and anemic my shower was until I was visiting him this weekend and showered yesterday morning at his house. It was heaven.

How can I turbocharge my own shower?

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Is all of your water supply anemic, or just the shower? If it's a universal problem, go down into the basement with someone who groks plumbing and look for the pressure regulator. Most of the time water comes into the house at a higher pressure and is then restricted before hitting the smaller pipes in your house; perhaps this restriction can be eased up a bit in your house. (But you don't want to just turn it off if you have small, old, or fragile pipes -- hence the person with plumbing clues.)

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I live in an older apartment building, so I have no idea where all that pressure regulator stuff is (and don't have any access to it). Most of my other water pressure is OK, not crazy strong, but not too bad.

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In the U.S., modern showerheads are federally regulated to be wimpy "to conserve water". If you're reasonably handy with pipe wrench and pliers, you can often remove the flow limiter in the showerhead — usually it's right at the washer.

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I put on a showerhead shortly after I moved in -- it's one of those with the handheld shower. I was hoping that would help the pressure but it doesn't really seem to have done so. I'll have to check out the flow limiter thing.

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Those were the first ones where I noticed the inclusion of flow limiters, actually — some 20 years ago. (It wasn't yet Federal law, but it was California law so they just shipped them with the limiters installed and provided instructions on how to remove it for non-CA residents.)

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You still don't want to take showers that would be that long. The wrinkly effect eventually kicks in and messes with your typing ability.

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But it'd still be longer than I can stay in the shower now (especially in winter, when the hot water lasts just barely long enough for me to shampoo and condition my hair if I time things right).

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Sigh, I miss the weirdest things about living in Britain, especially the arbitrarily long showers. I wonder if US voltage is actually up to the task?

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What? They're electric? I thought they were all gas and I'd have to run gas lines to the bathroom. Electric would be so much easier to install ...

(I heard about them, as "a European thing", from my father when I was small. As I recall, he was telling me they were nifty but apparently didn't exist in the US. The notion has stuck in my head for the past thirty-plus years. I've never actually seen one; the closest thing I've run across is a five-gallon, natural-gas-powered, bathroom water heater for eliminating the wait for the hot water to start coming out of the tap, but if I was reading the printing on the box correctly, it wasn't quite the "infinite water heater" I was looking for.)

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I think

madbodger is the expert on continuous flow water heaters.

Is your water heater electric? I just replaced an $8 heating element in

nosebeepbear's water heater that was causing extremely short showers.

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I may not be the expert, but I do have a demand hot water heater that does
indeed enable me to take arbitrary length showers. Mine's LPG powered,
as it uses 117Kbtu/h at full tilt, which is, of course, a little over 34KW.
There are electric demand water heaters, but they're mostly designed for
remote sink use, and don't support much flow rate. And the laws of
physics dictate that, even with a 240V feed, you'd need over 100 amps
to deliver that kind of power electrically. No wonder gas units are popular.
Even with current prices, electricity is an expensive source of heat.

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The ones in the UK are electric. Like I said, I don't know if American electricity is up to the task. (Of course, some of the cheesier models in the UK are also not up to the task, so it's not completely fair to blame the voltage.)

I wonder if Home Despot would have them. Not that you'd have to buy one there, but they may be a good indicator of whether such things can be had here.

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Almost all US homes are wired with 240 volt electricity for the big stuff (water heaters, stoves, heat, air conditioning, etc), as well as the wimpy 120 volt wiring for the plug-in stuff.

Of course,

dglenn's house originally had gas lighting, so I'm not going to make any assumptions about it's wiring!

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how well a cinderblock igloo would work and how long one would take to build.

Traditional igloos are built of stones; cinderblocks of variable size (to get the spiral right) would probably work pretty well, as long as you had good mortar to chink all the angular bits. (Snow igloos were used as temporary shelters, but not generally as long-term homes.)

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Yah, this is what my brain does

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