Electric shower head heaters Green Energy Efficient Homes. Constant hot water, constant savings. I lived in Costa Rica for a year, and while travelling there I discovered the electric shower head, a great way to save energy on hot water. If you live in North America you have probably not heard of these marvelous inventions, unless you live in a mobile home, or are at the cutting edge of energy efficiency. What are they An electric shower head heats ambient temperature water to a comfortable shower temperature as it is coming out the shower head. This means you dont need to keep a tank of water hot just so you can take a shower. Where Can I Buy Birth Control Patch In The Philippines. Or, if you live in a cooler climate, you dont have to keep your water as hot for other uses. Installing Shower Head Hand Held Shower' title='Installing Shower Head Hand Held Shower' />A comfortable shower temperature is usually slightly warmer than body temperature about 3. C, or 1. 00 to 1. F. If youre a devoted energy conserver, there arent a lot of other household hot water uses that require that hot a temperature. In fact you can do pretty much everything else in cold water, including laundry, dishes, filling the mop bucket, even running your automatic dishwasher which, if ENERGY STAR rated, has its own built in heater, although not all of them can handle starting from cold water. The only exception would be a bath, but if you can live without the occasional hot bath, you can cut your hot water bill to almost zero with an electric shower water heater. Can you really survive with no other hot water My initial reaction to this shower head which I tried in Costa Rica in about ten different versions as I hopped from house to hotel to house was that it would never work in a cold country like Canada. Why Because the water coming out my tap in Toronto is about 4. C or 3. 9F for much of the year, and even washing your hands in water that cold is extremely uncomfortable. If you have to heat water for washing your hands, why bother with the extra hardware of an electric shower fitting In tropical countries like Costa Rica, this isnt a problem. Since the weather is warm or hot year round, the water coming out the cold water tap is typically between 1. C and 2. 4C, which is warm enough that you dont get chilblains washing your hands in it. People in Costa Rica earn much less, on average, than North Americans, so they are more careful with their energy use. They wash their clothes and dishes in cold water too, and in fact in most houses the plumbing doesnt even have a hot water pipe. A shower is the only thing they cant handle taking cold. But that doesnt seem to make sense for North Americans, at least not in cooler areas. Then it occurred to me that the main reason North Americans set our hot water heater temperature so high especially for tank water heaters is so that we can take a nice long shower and not run out of hot water. If we could get by with warm water out of the hot water tank for washing hands, doing dishes, running the dishwasher, filling the mop bucket and with cold water for everything else, showers would be the only reason we would need our tank heater set to 6. C or 1. 40. F. But if we used an electric shower head, we could have endless hot water in our showers not that most serious energy savers would ever have a shower more than about ten or fifteen minutes long, and set our hot water tank heater as low as 3. C or 1. 00. F. That would still give us water warm enough to wash our hands or dishes in, and might put a big dent in our hot water bill. Note that the Canadian Government, for one, warns of the risk of Legionella or other bacterial diseases building up in hot water tanks that are not kept hot enough. Im not sure what the bacteria would be breeding on if your water is clean, or how they would breed if you have chlorine in your water supply. But be forewarned. Heating cold water to a comfortable temperature. Legionella warnings aside, as far as the input temperature being too cold, the fact is that you can still get hot water out with cold water going in you just have to reduce the flow. One brand of shower head, Coral, claims it can take incoming water as low as 4. F or 4. C above 5. F or 1. 0C is recommended. So it will work, at least marginally, in Canada. When selecting an electric shower head for use in a cold climate, it is very important to consider the input water temperature and the wattage of the unit. Consider the Lorenzetti electric showerhead pictured here. This shower head is rated at a maximum wattage of 5,5. Fahrenheit. The shower head is rated at 2 gallons per minute, which means that at full flow it can only warm the water by a maxiumum of 1. F or 1. 0. 6. C. If your input water is a balmy 8. F or 2. 7C, as it typically is in Costa Rica or in Brazil, where the Lorenzetti unit is made, your hot shower will run at full blast at 9. F or 3. 8C, which, being just above body temperature, will at least be comfortable in a warm bathroom. But what if youre in chilly Toronto in the winter The water in my tap comes out at around 4 6. Our hand held shower head reviews, we compare the top products on the market. Get the most out of your shower experience with the best handheld shower head. Need the Best Shower Head for your home Check out our reviews and get the perfect shower. Shower Fittings. This may give you some inspiration for your new bathroom, the latest in design and shower styling from renowned bathrooms manufacturer Crosswater. Are you looking for a perfect addition to your bathroom, but dont know how to choose the best shower head Our buying guide shower head reviews will help. How to Choose the Ultimate Shower Panel Material. In the same way that you wouldnt buy and install a chrome shower head in a bathroom with brass hardware, you. C 3. 9 4. 3F. To heat that to a comfortable 3. C or 1. 00. F is a differential of roughly 3. C or 5. 9F. With 5. Lorenzetti showerhead the water flow would have to throttle back to about 0. And unlike electric tankless water heaters, some of which can throttle back the flow to maintain the desired output temperature, most electric shower heads dont have a throttling feature so they just fail to warm the water sufficiently. So in a cold climate the best use for these shower heads is probably for something like an outdoor pool shower or a summer cottage shower or to heat the water to a comfort temperature from a hot water source, while keeping the hot water tank below comfortable shower temperature. Does the idea of washing your hands, or doing dishes, in cold water sound intolerableMaybe, but bear in mind that in many colder countries this is the norm. In Japan many houses have no hot water except for showering. And the winters can get pretty chilly there. This is just a discomfort people suffer because their energy is priced high enough to motivate them to make sacrifices. Temperature and safety problems. There are two main problems with electric shower heads temperature and safety. Temperature control. Handheld-Adjustable-Heights.jpg' alt='Installing Shower Head Hand Held Shower' title='Installing Shower Head Hand Held Shower' />The temperature out of the shower head depends on the speed of water flow, the temperature of the incoming water, and the available current. Nikon Picture Project Free Download For Windows 7 here. So there is no way to consistently get the same temperature each time you shower, unless your water pressure and voltage are constant, and you can memorize exactly how much to open the shower spigot. It does take a bit of getting used to I was warned that if I set the water too slow, I might get burned by the excessive heating of a small amount of water. But the shower heads seem to have a built in sensor to prevent this I havent been burned once. On the other hand, there have been times when the heat took a long time to kick in. Some of them appear to have a preheat period, and that period is sensitive to how fast the water flow is but whether more flow means a faster preheat or not, I havent been able to determine consistently. The point is, these electric shower heads take a little getting used to. But the more I use them the more convinced I am they make sense for any climate where a hot water heater isnt needed for other uses. Safety issues. Because electric shower heads are electrical devices they carry some risk of electric shock if installed incorrectly.