Opinion: Your shower head is lying to you about pressure

People bemoaning low flow don’t have experience with a good shower head. (Note: the author acknowledges this!)<p>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.<p>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 <i>high pressure</i> head and it was night and day better.<p>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.

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.

I pulled our flow restrictor out a couple years ago and watched our water bills over the year before and year after.<p>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&#x27;d expect drove up our water usage more.<p>Even if all 2.6% could be attributed to the flow restrictor, its not enough for me to go back to crappy showers.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;2025.02.26-115836&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;opinions&#x2F;2025&#x2F;02&#x2F;26&#x2F;shower-pressure-save-water&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;2025.02.26-115836&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonp...</a>

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&#x2F;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.

This is a great opinion piece about Personal Liberties and Free Markets. Thanks Jeff!

&gt; <i>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.</i><p>What does &quot;used&quot; mean in this case? Aren&#x27;t these closed systems?

This is one of the weird US debates I, a German, don&#x27;t understand, like that Seinfeld episode back then.<p>I never had the feeling that any of the shower heads here I was standing under was particularly bad. Maybe it&#x27;s different with those ominous low flow thingies.<p>But: If you&#x27;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&#x27;s a catastrophe.<p>(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&#x2F;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.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wolf-aqua-manufaktur.de&#x2F;shop&#x2F;de&#x2F;bubble-rain-handbrausen&#x2F;69-bubble-rain-espresso-xl-4260459530121.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wolf-aqua-manufaktur.de&#x2F;shop&#x2F;de&#x2F;bubble-rain-hand...</a>

Bezos has directed the WaPo opinion team to focus on the true enemy of the people - bathroom fixtures.

Invest into Hitachi, if you find shower head experience unsatisfactory.

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&#x27;s a hook to get you to read Lasswell&#x27;s confused jumble of weak quips and outright misleading statements.<p>---<p><pre><code> 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 </code></pre> Wow, pretty impressive, Mark. A single video posted to social media told you that?<p>---<p><pre><code> “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. </code></pre> This would be the study that found that people are _satisfied_ with low flow when water pressure is high.<p>---<p>This guy seems like a complete hack, but he&#x27;s also just what Bezos ordered.

It&#x27;s frankly ridiculous that people thousands of miles away in Washington have <i>any</i> say over what goes on in our bathrooms (modulo basic safety strictures.)<p>My current apartment came with a showerhead that (I assume) was compliant with the Obama&#x2F;Biden rules. It <i>dribbled</i> water until, sopping wet and desperate, I grabbed a pair of pliers and bashed out the flow limiter. My water bill didn&#x27;t even budge.

&quot;I was speaking truth to shower.&quot;<p>It is a good read!