Reliance Water-Saving Shower Delivers Perfect Temp
by TreeHugger on 04. 3.05
The Thermostatic Shower does all this and looks pretty sharp as well. There's nothing worse than shivering in your birthday suit on a cold winter's morning, waiting for the shower temperature to reach a barely tolerable level. From an environmental viewpoint, it's also pretty difficult to watch a day's worth of water for drought-stricken families, go uselessly down the drain.
Unfortunately, for most of us, this is an everyday event. It's mind boggling to picture the amount of people who go through this very process each day. It's upsetting to think of the millions of litres of water that are wasted that could easily be conserved. There is a solution to this problem, and to tell you the truth it's been around for a fair while. It's called the Thermostatic Shower.
Renaissance Grande Shower
With this ingenious device, you set the temperature you are comfortable with and when your hot water system reaches the desired level, your perfect shower awaits you. No more goose-bumps or wasted water. The Thermostatic Shower is commercially used in hospitals and retirement homes to ensure that patients and the elderly do not scald themselves while taking a shower.
Recently, it has undergone a transformation and has shed its utilitarian look to become very modern and aesthetically pleasing. This device is available to individual home owners in a variety of designs for a reasonable price. It can easily be installed in new dwellings or retrofitted into older bathrooms by your local plumber.
Victorian Concealed Shower
It's not hard to envisage the water and monetary savings this device could return, if city councils offered subsidies on its purchase.
[by Gavin Leiminer]
::Reliance Thermostatic Showers
::Renaissance Thermostatic Showers
::Selection of Thermostatic Showers
Uh, how do these things deal with the fact that all the water between your showerhead and your hot water tank is at room temperature after sitting in the pipes overnight? From what I understand, these things don't heat up this water -- they're safety devices to prevent scalding. That water in the pipe has to be either heated up or run through before you get the hot water up to the thermostatic valve.
Uh, how do these things deal with the fact that all the water between your showerhead and your hot water tank is at room temperature after sitting in the pipes overnight? From what I understand, these things don't heat up this water -- they're safety devices to prevent scalding. That water in the pipe has to be either heated up or run through before you get the hot water up to the thermostatic valve.
Best possible combination is to have an on-demand water heater/booster close to the shower. Second best is to locate a hot water heater on each floor of the residence (close to bathroom/dishwater as possible).
The secondary benefits of these are several: kids can manage them easily; when someone else runs the water or flushes, you are not forced to constantly readjust the valves, lengthening the shower and wasting more water. The device does it automatically.
Those who live in northern climates know that public water feed temperature cycles downward during the cold months (tracking soil temperature), so that the "delta T" between Hot and Cold gets wider as the winter comes on. Because we tend to take hotter and longer showers in the winter, the device is most useful just when its needed.
Major home store outlets have these "temperature balancing" valves now at very reasonable prices. Some are not bad looking.
TIP: the inner workings should come with a good long warranty. Mine failed to work properly after a month and Kohler replaced it with a 48-hour turnaround from my complaint call. They acknolwedged a quality problem right up front and sent the plastic kit that I could install without a plumber. These inner workings are plastic, in spite of the metallic outer finish. The design life of those inner workings is bound to be less than 20 years.
As a more minimal solution, I bought one of these:
http://www.realgoods.com/shop/shop2.cfm?dv=2&dp=205&ts=1046104&kw=shower%20head
After a little "break in" and getting used to it, it feels pretty good ... but I'm in California ... tap water is 70F right now, so what do I know.
In California, there is now a requirement in new housing for "anti-scalding" shower faucets. They act like thermostatic faucets, but instead work by simply regulating pressure of one (hot) to match supply pressure changes of the other (cold), which is much cheaper. When someone flushes a nearby toilet, you don't even feel a temperature change (they work pretty well).
Sounds like this device would regulate the temperature fine as long as it has some supply of hot and cold water.
But what I want is a way to save the water I waste when I first turn the shower (or the bathroom or kitchen tap) on. I have to wait for the cold water in the pipe to flush out before the hot water arrives from the heater. This will still apply in our new house with its solar water heater (in fact it may be worse, as the heater will be up on the roof further away).
What I'm thinking of is some kind of thermostatic valve to divert the cold water back to our rainwater tank until it warms up.
Any ideas?
In reply to jon july 10 2005.. I have a patent for a thermo valve and system, that diverts this cold water and saves it. It is currently being adopted by a number of Australian water companies, and by a number of EEC countries, will be interested in any enquiries..
degs 30th July 2005